On Monday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shot back at Republicans who were complaining about high gas prices, pointing out the flawed logic of comparing current prices to prices under the Trump administration during the early days of the pandemic.
Over the weekend, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, wrote, “Under President Trump, gas was about $2.17 in 2020.” While gas prices were indeed low in 2020 compared to previous years, they had taken a plunge after a national emergency was declared in March, and stayed relatively low for the rest of the year as people drove significantly less during the beginning of the pandemic.
Ocasio-Cortez pointed to this vital context in her reply to Blackburn on Twitter. “Maybe that has something to do with the fact that everyone in the country was quarantining while 350,000 people died and COVID vaccines weren’t out yet,” the New York lawmaker said.
She then called out Republicans who have been complaining about gas prices over the past months. “Unemployment also hit 14.8 percent in 2020, the highest rate ever seen in the US since data collection began,” she said. “Does the Senator want to jump to claim that as Trump’s legacy too? Or would we rather examine context and data like adults?”
Circumstances in 2020 were so extreme, in fact, that oil trading prices briefly fell into the negatives weeks after the pandemic hit the U.S.
Other Democrats also criticized Blackburn for blatantly ignoring context in her tweet. “Yes! Low gas prices was a nice upside consequence of the cataclysmic 2020 economic meltdown,” wrote Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut).
Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) have also blamed Biden for high gas prices because of his revocation of the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. But the pipeline wouldn’t even have been built by now, and studies have found that it actually would have increased gas prices in the Midwest and not affected prices nationwide.
Although retail prices have been reaching highs recently, experts say that there’s little Biden can do about it. On Tuesday, Biden announced that his administration is banning Russian oil imports, one of the few actions he can take that could potentially impact gas prices — but still, the vast majority of U.S. crude oil imports come from other countries.
As Biden has pointed out, however, some of the blame for high gas prices falls on oil companies themselves. Late last year, Biden asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether or not oil and gas companies are driving up gas prices at the pump in order to pad their profits.
In response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion, Biden warned oil and gas companies not to use the crisis as an excuse to raise prices. Meanwhile, lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and climate activists have called for a windfall tax on oil company profits during the crisis to discourage them from artificially inflating prices.
There are two Republican centers of gravity coming together in and around Washington D.C., and on spec, they couldn’t seem to be more different. On one side are the truckers currently engirding the D.C. metro area in an attempt to create some chrome-heeled Woodstock dystopia where everyone took the brown acid despite repeated warnings. Back in town, the ultra-conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is organizing its annual World Forum confab, which will be held this weekend down at posh Sea Island, Georgia. The event will feature a constellation of Republican leaders and deep-pocket conservative megadonors, all looking to rub their collective woes together regarding the state of political play. They would have the upcoming midterms by the throat, they fret, but for that headless orange chicken down in Florida who keeps running and running because it refuses to believe it’s already dead.
AEI and its upcoming forum have positioned themselves as vividly Not Trump. The former president was pointedly not invited to the affair, and among the key speakers will be Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has finally made his distaste for Trump very public. Also speaking is Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, who made Trump’s all-time shit list for doing his job by certifying President Biden’s win in that state. Several other Republicans of like mind are expected to speak, and the affair may serve to formalize the expanding rift between the old-line party and its Trump-obsessed base.
Take a drive out of town and find that base in its truck convoy, however, and pumping up Trump appeared to be the last thing on most everyone’s mind. Historian Terry Bouton explored the trucker encampment at the Hagerstown Speedway, and was struck by how little politics was discussed. “Lots of Trump gear, but no one was talking about him,” he noted. “Not one person mentioned Russia or Ukraine all day.”
So what do they want? The whole trucker protest convoy idea began in Canada (funded with U.S. donations) with a fight against vaccine mandates at the border, but as mandates are rapidly going the way of the dodo, convoy organizers threw wide the doors for any and all far-right ultra-nationalist white power super-conspiracy advocates to join in, the fringe of the fringe of the fringe as it were, and the scene got weird at warp speed. Weird, and more than a little ominous.
“This was a movement-recruiting event,” reported Bouton. “It was designed to draw people in with a family-friendly, carnival atmosphere. Free food & drinks. Booths, activities, a prayer tent. Revving engines, honking horns, bright lights. ‘Sign My Truck’ with sharpies. T-shirt and flag vendors. There was a clear attempt to appear more mainstream. The focus was a big-tent ideology of ‘Freedom.’ Although started by anti-vaxxers, it was re-framed as ‘protecting our liberties’ in ways that allowed for diverse beliefs. Christian Nationalism mixed with QAnon spiritualism.”
“Christian Nationalism mixed with QAnon spiritualism” is what passes for “diverse beliefs” on the trucker circuit these days, I guess. No such wildness over at AEI, of course. Having a CEO who once worked for Democrats is about as far outside the lines as those folks tend to go. These are serious people about serious business.
AEI, you may recall, is the birth mother of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), another right-wing think tank that most every George W. Bush-era neo-conservative called home at one point or another roundabout the turn of the century. Their blueprint for the future, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” envisioned a far more militarily muscular U.S. bringing “Pax Americana” to the Middle East. All they needed was a catalyst, “a new Pearl Harbor” as they put it, and on September 11, 2001, they got exactly what they needed.
In short, this — all this, every bit of this, this ash pile we occupy, this careening juggernaut, this doomed and double-damned moment, right now — is the future PNAC and AEI set up for us 20 years ago. Soon, they’ll be down at Sea Island taking in the ocean air and plotting their next big play… and that right there is the THUD in the middle of the sentence: What play can they plan for with Trump bashing around, and with the GOP base seemingly in his grasp?
To be sure, certain high-profile GOP figures are slipping away from Trump. Mike Pence, who can easily be mistaken for a glass of low-fat milk if the prescription on your glasses is out of date, smacked Trump around at a GOP fundraiser the other day. That’s like getting attacked by a footrest.
Mitt Romney, who spends most of his time doing an excellent “Sam the Eagle from the Muppet Show” imitation, channeled some undistilled Don Rickles in his recent takedown of Trump’s most ardent allies within the party. Trump’s only response has been incoherent yelling about the fact that his precious new social media platform works almost as well as two tin cans tied together with string (and yes, these are a few of my favorite things). When Pence and Romney get bold, it’s hats over the windmill.
The Not Trumpers have their work cut out for them, because it isn’t just QAnon spiritualists flooding his corner. As recently as a week ago, a large majority of all Republicans want him to run again in 2024, preferring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the nominee only if Trump stays home. Many of those still believe the big lie that Trump has been weaving for more than a year now. Much of the GOP has become like one of those bouncy rooms that gets caught in the wind and goes flying over the horizon with the kids still inside; McConnell and his ilk will need some long ropes to haul them back down to Earth.
Right now, the GOP is like a loaf of bread split down the middle. One half is stale and moldy, the other hot and filled to bursting with grubs and mealworms. The two have existed together, and even thrived, for a very long and damaging time.
The party is still mightily dangerous; even in its separated state, it is an ultimate menace. If it is repaired, the rest of us will lose badly, perhaps mortally. This bears watching.
Former President Donald Trump has officially endorsed a plan, created by a man who has self-identified with the Oath Keeper militia, that aims to have Trump supporters consolidate control of the Republican Party.
The plan, known as the “precinct strategy,” has been repeatedly promoted on Steve Bannon’s popular podcast. As ProPublica detailed last year, it has already inspired thousands of people to fill positions at the lowest rung of the party ladder. Though these positions are low-profile and often vacant, they hold critical powers: They help elect higher-ranking party officers, influence which candidates appear on the ballot, turn out voters on Election Day and even staff the polling precincts where people vote and the election boards that certify the results.
“Just heard about an incredible effort underway that will strengthen the Republican Party,” Trump said Sunday in a statement emailed to his supporters. “If members of our Great movement start getting involved (that means YOU becoming a precinct committeeman for your voting precinct), we can take back our great Country from the ground up.”
Trump’s email named Dan Schultz, an Arizona lawyer and local party official who first developed the precinct strategy more than a decade ago. Schultz spent years trying to promote his plan and recruit precinct officers. In 2014, he posted a callout to an internal forum for the Oath Keepers militia group, according to hacked records obtained by ProPublica.
“Why don’t you all join me and the other Oath Keepers who are ‘inside’ the Party already,” Schultz wrote under a screen name. “If we conservatives were to do that, we’d OWN the Party.”
Federal prosecutors in January charged the leader of the Oath Keepers and 10 of its other members with seditious conspiracy in last year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol. One of them pleaded guilty, as have several members of the group in related cases who are cooperating with the investigation. The group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, pleaded not guilty.
There is no indication that Schultz had any involvement in the Capitol riot.
Schultz told ProPublica he never became a formal member of the Oath Keepers organization. “I have taken oaths to support and defend the Constitution as a West Point cadet, as a commissioned U.S. Army officer and as a practicing attorney,” Schultz said in a text message. “Those oaths do not have expiration dates, by my way of thinking, and I have kept my oaths. In that sense, I am an ‘oath keeper.’”
According to experts on extremist groups, the Oath Keepers recruit military and law enforcement veterans using the idea that their oath to defend the Constitution never expired. The group then urges people to resist what they say are impending orders to take away Americans’ guns or create concentration camps.
“I don’t ever want to be pulling the trigger on an AR-15 in my neighborhood,” Schultz said in a 2015 conference call with fellow organizers, referring to the semi-automatic rifle. “Oath Keepers, I love them for instilling the oath. But what they need to do also, I think, is spread the message that hey, we can do stuff politically so we never get to the cartridge box.”
In more recent interviews on right-wing podcasts and internet talk shows, Schultz has repeatedly described his precinct strategy as a last alternative to violence.
“It’s not going to be peaceful the next go-round, perhaps,” Schultz said in a June interview with the pro-Trump personality David Clements. “But it ought to be, and the way to ensure that it will be is we’ve got to get enough of these good decent Americans to take over one of the two major political parties.”
It was not clear whether Trump or his aides were aware that Schultz has self-identified with the Oath Keepers. Trump’s spokesperson, Liz Harrington, did not respond to requests for comment.
Schultz has spent months trying to get his idea in front of Trump. Steve Stern, a fellow movement organizer, told ProPublica that he met a former Trump administration official for lunch at Mar-a-Lago, the ex-president’s private club in Palm Beach, in December. While there, Stern said, he got a chance to briefly mention the project to Trump.
Then, last month, Schultz and Stern landed an interview on a talk show hosted by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who promotes conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Lindell said he would discuss the plan with Trump personally. Schultz and Stern followed up with a conference call with Harrington and Bannon, according to Stern. Harrington previously worked at Bannon’s “War Room” website.
“I know the president’s very jacked up about it,” Bannon said on his podcast, speaking with Schultz after Trump released the endorsement. “Help MAGA, help the America First movement, right? Help the deplorables, help President Trump, help yourself, your country, community, your kids, grandkids, all of it. Put your shoulder to the wheel.”
Bannon, who led Trump’s 2016 campaign, originally lifted the precinct strategy to prominence in a podcast interview with Schultz last year. After the episode aired, thousands of people answered Bannon’s call to become precinct officers in pivotal swing states, according to data compiled by ProPublica from county records and interviews with local party officials.
As of last August, GOP leaders in 41 counties reported an unusual increase in sign-ups since Bannon’s first interview with Schultz, adding a total of more than 8,500 new precinct officers. The trend appears to have continued since then. New precinct officers started using their powers to remove or censure Republican leaders who contradicted Trump’s election lies and to recruit people who believe the election was stolen into positions as poll watchers and poll workers.
Bannon received a last-minute pardon from Trump after the former adviser was charged with financial fraud. He has pleaded not guilty to contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Bannon’s spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
In addition to Bannon and Lindell, the precinct strategy has won support from pro-Trump figures such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who urged Trump to impose martial law, and lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, who led some of the lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results. Right-wing groups such as Turning Point Action, which organized buses to transport rallygoers on Jan. 6, also joined the effort to recruit precinct officers.
While Stern said he’s thrilled about Trump’s written statement endorsing the precinct strategy, he said he hopes to hear it from Trump’s own lips at an upcoming rally. Stern said he plans to be there with tables to sign more people up.
The United States and Iran appear to be in the final stages of negotiations to revive a 2015 agreement, known officially as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which imposed strict limits on Iran’s nuclear enrichment capabilities in exchange for lessening the country’s diplomatic and economic isolation. Some reports say a deal could be announced in as soon as two weeks.
There are still several key sticking points that could derail the negotiations. Iran’s government wants assurances that any agreement won’t be ripped up by a future U.S. president, as Donald Trump did with the first deal. Those assurances aren’t likely to be forthcoming, however, as the Senate is all but guaranteed not to ratify any deal as an official treaty. Instead, it would be an executive agreement, like the first deal, which can be undone by future executive actions. Even if the first deal had been ratified as a treaty, it’s possible Trump could have exited the deal without congressional approval. Iran has also reportedly asked that its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps be removed from a U.S. terrorist watchlist; it’s not clear whether the Biden administration is considering taking that measure.
Hardliners in both the United States and Iran have long opposed any deal that the other country could agree on. Former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate who negotiated and ultimately signed the agreement, has been politically marginalized and targeted by opponents of the deal, some of whom have gone so far as to demand he be prosecuted for treason.
Opposition to diplomacy is prevalent among elected Republicans in the United States as well. More than 150 Republican members of Congress recently signed a letter promising to oppose any deal between the Biden administration and Iran that wasn’t simultaneously ratified as a treaty and approved by two-thirds of the Senate. The Republicans’ letter to Biden states that if he “forge[s] an agreement with the Supreme Leader of Iran without formal Congressional approval, it will be temporary and non-binding and meet the same fate” as the deal negotiated under President Obama.
Earlier this month, 33 Republican senators sent their own letter with a similar warning. “Any agreement related to Iran’s nuclear program which is not a treaty ratified by the Senate is subject to being reversed, and indeed will likely be torn up, in the opening days of the next Presidential administration, as early as January 2025,” the senators wrote.
The original 2015 deal gave Congress a 60-day review period to study the agreement, and Republicans in both chambers were ultimately unsuccessful in derailing it legislatively.
The practical effect of the threats is limited, as least for the time being. “The reality is that the JCPOA has already been reviewed and voted on in Congress,” Ali Vaez, Iran project director at Crisis Group, recently told Axios. “All the political posturing notwithstanding, there is practically nothing that Congress can do to stop that from happening.”
Still, the two letters send an unmistakable message to Iran’s leaders that should a Republican win the presidential election in 2024, any diplomatic agreements made by the Biden administration won’t be honored.
In an interview in the Financial Times, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian called on Congress to “issue a political statement announcing their support of the agreement and a return to J.C.P.O.A.” He added, “Iran cannot accept as a guarantee the words of a head of state, let alone the United States, due to the withdrawal of Americans from the JCPOA.”
Joe Cirincione, a distinguished fellow at the Quincy Institute, tweeted that “the biggest remaining obstacle” to a deal was “the lack of US credibility” due to Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the first deal.
Trump withdrew from the agreement in May 2018, despite his own administration twice certifying that Iran was in compliance with the deal. The U.S. then imposed harsh sanctions on Iran, driving up energy prices and inflicting significant pain on Iranian citizens. The sanctions also severely limited Iranians’ access to medicine and other health care, despite theoretical exemptions for humanitarian aid. “For ordinary people, sanctions mean unemployment, sanctions mean becoming poor, sanctions mean the scarcity of medicine, the rising price of dollar,” Akbar Shamsodini, an Iranian businessman told The Guardian in 2018. The other signatories to the deal — France, Germany, the U.K., China and Russia — were all forced to determine whether or not they would continue to abide by the agreed-upon terms of the deal.
Iran has long stated that its nuclear program is only for energy production, and is entirely peaceful. Those claims are supported by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which hasn’t found evidence that Iran is making a nuclear weapon. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently reiterated that his country is only developing its nuclear program for peaceful purposes, specifically to ensure their energy independence.
Opposition to the deal is nearly uniform in the Republican Party. Signatories to the recent letter to Biden included House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, hardcore Trumpists like Louie Gohmert and Jim Jordan, and “never-Trump” conservative Liz Cheney. Indeed, ever since then-President George W. Bush included Iran in the so-called Axis of Evil in his 2002 State of the Union address, conservatives have found wide-ranging political utility in manufacturing Iran as the world’s great supervillain.
For as much ink is spilled about the supposed fractures in the Republican Party, the unanimously hawkish approach to Iran is illuminating. Although Trump engaged in more explicitly anti-Muslim, bigoted rhetoric than his fellow primary candidates in 2016, every Republican presidential hopeful promised to rip up the deal, regardless of Iran’s compliance.
In many ways, the anti-Iran positions help clarify how little daylight there is between the so-called nationalist wing of the party and the more traditional neoconservative wing. Members of the nationalist wing — as epitomized by Trump, his adviser Steve Bannon, and Congresspeople Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert — are more likely to engage in open Islamophobia in staking out their anti-Iran positions. But much of the conservative, anti-Iran rhetoric from the Bush-era onward has relied on racist, Orientalist tropes about Iranians being untrustworthy, sneaky or duplicitous, or else suicidal, irrational and universally consumed by antisemitism. Far too much reporting in the United States has also uncritically advanced the idea that Iran is committed to acquiring nuclear weapons and is on the verge of doing so, regardless of changing conditions in the country.
Another aspect of the recent House GOP letter deserves attention: The letter highlighted the role Russia is reportedly playing in the negotiations, which have been largely indirect between Iran and the United States. Republicans promised to “investigate any connections” between the Iran talks and the concurrent diplomatic efforts to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine. The letter states: “If your dependency on the Russians to revive the JCPOA is weakening our deterrent posture with the Russians in other areas of the world, the American people deserve to know.”
As Carl Beijer wrote in reaction, Republicans are “suggest[ing] that if Biden manages to make a deal with Iran, it will be because he pulled his punches in Ukraine and thereby gained Russia’s assistance.” Beijer calls this effort “an absolutely monstrous gambit” and argues that, “[t]he GOP is hoping to peel support off Biden’s supporters among people who are anxious about Russia by promoting a narrative where any deal he cuts with Iran implies a backchannel deal with Putin as well. And where any de-escalation in Ukraine implies the same thing.”
The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress should forcefully push back against this kind of new Cold War reasoning and continue to pursue diplomacy with Iran, making every effort to de-escalate the looming conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Agitating for open conflict only serves the hardliners and war profiteers in the United States and abroad — and endangers countless lives.
Republicans, conservative pundits and Big Oil took less than 24 hours after Russia invaded Ukraine to begin advocating for more oil drilling and fracking in the name of supposed energy independence.
“Fracking may be America’s most powerful weapon against Russian aggression,” read an op-ed from a Bloomberg columnist who formerly led a Standard Oil and Koch family funded think tank.
The American Petroleum Institute (API) made a Twitter thread just as Vladimir Putin was announcing attacks on Ukraine. “As crisis looms in Ukraine, U.S. energy leadership is more important than ever,” API wrote, encouraging the White House to lease and permit even more drilling on and offshore.
In an earnings call on Thursday by natural gas exporter Cheniere, CEO Jack Fusco said that the invasion is good for business, Aronoff reported. “It’s tragic what’s going on in Eastern Europe, and it saddens me to see the satellite images on the newscreen that we’ve all witnessed this morning,” Fusco said. “But if anything, these high prices, the volatility, drive even more energy security and long-term contracting.”
Conservative lawmakers also hopped onto the Big Oil cronyism. Far right Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) posted a video saying that the federal government should immediately start producing oil at full capacity and exporting gas to Europe in order to combat inflation. Boebert has close ties to the fossil fuel industry; her husband has made hundreds of thousands of dollars consulting for Texas driller Terra Energy Partners.
Meanwhile, Republicans are saying that Democrats’ “green agenda” and supposed “war on American oil and gas” is to blame for Putin’s invasion – nevermind the fact that Biden approved oil and gas drilling at a higher rate than Trump did in 2021.
It’s extremely cynical to use this moment to encourage expanding fossil fuel production – and thus attempt to worsen the climate crisis – as thousands of people in Ukraine face instability, vicious attacks and uncertainty due to Russian forces. As conservatives and Big Oil attempt to exploit this moment for profit, antiwar activists in Russia and Ukraine are potentially putting their lives on the line to protest the Russian invasion.
Rather, oil and gas companies have already been making record profits by taking advantage of inflation and economic uncertainty, causing President Joe Biden and other Democrats to probe whether or not companies are breaking antitrust laws in order to pad their pockets. Indeed, in remarks on Thursday, Biden urged oil and gas companies to “not exploit this moment to hike their prices to raise profits.”
In the new GOP platform for the midterm elections, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida) has laid out the Republican party’s response to Democrats’ rallying cry to tax the rich: slash funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and tax the poor.
“All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount,” reads Scott’s 11 point plan. “Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.”
While it’s true that about half of American households typically don’t pay income taxes, this is because their incomes aren’t high enough to pass the threshold for income tax liability; lower-income households also sometimes receive tax credits. Many low-income people still owe payroll taxes, however.
A new tax on the bottom half of income earners could have severely deleterious effects on the people already most in need of financial help, especially in a time when the wealth gap in the U.S. is multiplying. Such a measure would likely be extremely unpopular, and has already garnered criticism from top Democrats, who have pointed out that Republicans want to raise taxes on over half of Americans.
Scott denied on Fox News that his plan would implement new income taxes on over half of the country, despite the fact that this proposal is clearly outlined in his “Plan to Rescue America.” Other Republicans defended the 11-point plan. “He’s at least raising important questions over, ‘Should every American have some stake in the country?’” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
While he is advocating to raise taxes on lower-income families, Scott is also attempting to give the rich even more opportunities to dodge taxes. If Republicans retake power, the plan reads, “We will immediately cut the IRS funding and workforce by 50 percent.”
This would have an enormous impact on tax enforcement in the country. Republicans have already gutted the IRS over the years; in fact, the agency is so underfunded that it’s warned that this year’s tax season will be challenging because it is still catching up with last year’s tax filings.
As a result, the IRS hasn’t had the resources for years to go after wealthy tax dodgers, who can use sophisticated methods of tax dodging that are too complex for the agency to be able to track. Rather, with an insufficient budget and workforce, the IRS disproportionately audits low-income people who benefit from the Earned Income Tax Credit. Meanwhile, the nation’s wealthiest people get away with paying little to no federal income taxes at all, allowing them to continue to accumulate unfathomable amounts of wealth.
The plan gives no real reason for gutting the IRS, though Republicans often argue for less punitive regulations for corporations and the rich, while advocating for more regulations for the poor. Democrats have proposed increasing IRS funding, but Republicans shot down a plan to increase the agency’s funding in negotiations for last year’s infrastructure bill, as corporations lobbied hard against the proposal.
If implemented, the GOP’s plan would raise taxes on the poor while providing even more tax loopholes for the rich. It’s ironic that the GOP is arguing that this plan would ensure everyone in the U.S. has “skin in the game” in order to benefit from public services or contribute to society, when it is largely the wealthy who get undue tax breaks despite not needing the extra funds to survive.
Scott’s plan also includes numerous extremist proposals that could actively harm the government and the public. The plan contains attacks on transgender people, leftists, schools, people of color, and much more. As part of the political right wing’s fascist attacks on education, the plan would shutter the Department of Education entirely. It would also bar any increases to the debt ceiling. Republicans have advocated for such limits to demonstrate their so-called fiscal responsibility, despite the fact that not allowing raises to the debt ceiling could be calamitous.
Three Republican candidates for attorney general in Michigan, vying to win their party’s primary so they can attempt to oust the current Democratic incumbent, indicated support for undoing a landmark Supreme Court decision from over half a century ago that lifted restrictions to accessing birth control.
Former state House Speaker Tom Leonard, current state Rep. Ryan Berman, and Matthew DePerno, a lawyer in the state who has pushed false claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, met on Friday in Alpena, Michigan, for a debate over who should become the Republican nominee for state Attorney General. During the event, a member of the audience asked the candidates what their views were on the Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, a ruling made in 1965 that guaranteed couples in the U.S. the right to receive information on and access to contraceptives.
All three candidates were “caught off guard” by the question, according to reporting from The Detroit News, and were apparently ignorant of what the ruling entailed. Upon further clarification, however, all three candidates indicated opposition to the Supreme Court’s ruling, saying that it violated states’ rights to restrict access to birth control for their residents.
“This case, much like Roe v. Wade, I believe was wrongly decided, because this is, it was an issue that trampled upon state’s rights,” Leonard said in response. “It was an issue that should have been left up to the states.”
“The Supreme Court … has to decide, mark my words, that the privacy issue currently is unworkable. It’s going to be a states’ rights issue on all these things, as it should be,” chimed in DePerno.
Berman said he needed to do more research on the ruling, but also stated that he’s for “states’ rights” and in favor of limiting “judicial activism” at the federal level.
Current Democratic state Attorney General Dana Nessel responded to the comments from the three men with shock, writing on Twitter her own response to their views.
“The party of ‘limited government’ wants direct involvement in everything you do in the bedroom,” Nessel wrote. “The Handmaids Tale is no longer dystopian fiction.”
In another tweet, Nessel made a promise to voters to defend against the undoing of Griswold.
“As MI Attorney General, I will continue to defend the constitutional right to privacy and to ensure (and, oh my God, I can’t believe I have to say this) your legal right to use contraceptives in our state,” Nessel said. “This is definitely a campaign promise I never imagined having to make.”
Seeking to clarify their stances, the Republican candidates for attorney general tried to stipulate that they weren’t against contraception or birth control, but rather the way the Supreme Court had ruled in 1965.
“Our rights should be grounded in the Constitution’s text and tradition, not a judge’s feelings,” Leonard said in a statement on Monday, adding that Nessel’s comments indicated, in his mind, that she is a “fringe culture war activist.”
Leonard, who admitted his ignorance about the ruling, wrongly purported that the Constitution was not involved in the forming of Griswold. In fact, several constitutional amendments and the precedent they created were cited in the Court’s 7-2 decision forming a penumbra of rights that allowed the justices to affirm a right to privacy in certain situations.
“Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship,” the Court’s opinion stated.
The ruling also referenced the Ninth Amendment, found within the Bill of Rights, which recognized that the “enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
Responding to Leonard’s comments made on Monday, Nessel asked whether other rulings from the Court – including those disallowing restrictions on marriage rights, access to education, and other topics – were improperly made, since they trampled on supposed states’ rights.
“If Griswold was wrongly decided and criminalization of contraception is a ‘state’s rights’ issue the legislature gets to vote on, what about Loving v VA? Brown v Bd of Ed? Lawrence v Texas? Obergefell v Hodges? Bostock v Clayton Co? Also all wrongly decided & fringe war activism?” Nessel asked.
The Louisiana Senate recently continued the state’s long history of racial oppression by voting down Sen. Cleo Fields’s congressional redistricting map. What’s more, the Louisiana House voted down Rep. Randal Gaines’s congressional redistricting map. Gaines is a veteran and civil rights attorney who represents one of the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Ida (river parishes), and Fields is an attorney and former congressman. Gaines’s and Fields’s proposals included two majority-minority districts (electoral districts where the majority of the constituents are people of color) giving them an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice — something Black voters in the state advocated for. Since the Black population has grown in Louisiana, an additional seat representing this shift is warranted, just and fair.
But in Louisiana, as in other parts of the country, map drawers are refusing to create new electoral opportunities for communities of color. What’s more, they are actively dismantling Black voting power by carving up Black communities in some states or packing Black communities into fewer districts in other states. These manipulative tactics make it harder for Black voters to elect candidates of choice, regardless of turnout or Black population growth.
We’ve seen this play out time and again in Louisiana, where Black voters have not always been treated equitably. My organization, the Power Coalition for Equity & Justice, understood this history and participated in a statewide roadshow allowing legislators and voters to directly engage around redistricting. Throughout the roadshow, which ran from October 20, 2021, through January 20, 2022, voters shared extensive testimony on the importance of representation.
Across the state, countless voters expressed the need for legislators to add an additional majority-minority district given that 33 percent of the state’s population is Black. Louisiana has six congressional districts; one-third of six is two. Rather than surrendering to the will of the people or the logic of population growth, legislators continue machinations that will silence voters.
State Sen. Sharon Hewitt suggested she was actually protecting Black voters by not creating a second majority-minority district because she didn’t think a 51 or 52 percent majority-Black district would turn out to vote, meaning they wouldn’t be able to elect a candidate of choice. But many Black voters would take 51 or 52 percent any day over not having a committed and representative voice. No legislator should be able to unilaterally decide what voters need; voters should have more influence.
In the absence of a process that levels the playing field by allowing voters to select who represents them, legislators have outsized influence. For instance, our current congressional House delegation sits on several powerful committees. As the second-poorest state in the country, Louisianians are not benefiting or growing from this representation. In fact, our delegation recently voted against the president’s infrastructure bill, with the exception of Congressman Troy Carter, who currently holds the only majority-Black seat. Their resistance could have blocked a wonderful opportunity to invest in crumbling infrastructure. This is a risk we cannot continue to take.
It is clear that any maps with an additional district will never make it out of committee. State leaders will certainly try to amend on the floor, much like they did on the Senate side, when State Senator Fields made a powerful and compelling plea for his colleagues to do the right thing.
The next step is for a map with only one majority-minority district to go before Gov. John Bel Edwards, who can and should veto the map. Edwards should unite with the people of color in his state, particularly since Black voters helped propel him into office. For his part, Governor Edwards said he would veto unfair maps.
He would be in good company. Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas vetoed the racially discriminatory maps put forth by legislatures in their states. Their vetoes were overturned, but their willingness to support the people of their state will be reflected in the history books. Moreover, several residents from three Kansas counties sued to block the state’s newly passed congressional maps, which conservatives in the state passed in early February.
Louisiana has the second-largest Black population in the country, second only to Mississippi. If the governors of Kansas and Kentucky, who have much smaller Black populations, can stand for equity and fairness, Governor Edwards can certainly do the same.
There can be no protection without representation.
Much of what has happened during our redistricting process seems to be heading toward litigation. I hope Louisiana’s leaders remember that we experienced a 4.8 percent drop in the white population, and demographic trends show that it will continue to decrease. My question is: When our population shifts to a white minority, will legislators think it is fair, given the decisions they have made to continue to racially gerrymander and silence the voices of voters of color? I hope Louisiana’s leaders consider that people of color represent more than 40 percent of the population, and with the current maps being considered, only receive less than 25 percent of the representation. In what scenario would anyone take less than they deserve?
The truth is that immigration is driving population shifts in the United States. And most of the people immigrating to this country are people of color, including Black immigrants. Legislators cannot hold communities of color hostage by continually drawing district lines that ignore population growth.
As we think about redistricting, we should ground it in the broader fight for freedom. As Davante Lewis, director of public affairs and outreach for the Louisiana Budget Project, noted in his testimony before the House Governmental Affairs Committee, Black people have endured decades of trauma. Legislators can help ensure progress by drawing fair maps and allowing voters of color to elect candidates of their choice. To gaslight voters by downplaying their population growth is a continuation of their traumatic history.
All people deserve elected officials who will advocate for them. Legislators should not be able to cherry-pick their voters. But unless and until we have an equitable process, legislators will continue to thwart the will of the people, especially when the people are Black, people of color, or persons living in poverty.
Just 13 of the 143 Texas Republicans running for Congress acknowledge that the results of the 2020 election are “legitimate,” according to a survey.
Hearst Newspapers sent questions about the election to all 143 candidates and only a baker’s dozen accepted the results of the election despite repeated recounts, audits and court cases that have found no evidence of any fraud or election-rigging that could have impacted the results, according to the Houston Chronicle.
At least 42 of the candidates claimed that the election was stolen outright, called the results illegitimate or said they would have voted not to certify the results after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Another 11 candidates falsely claimed that there was enough fraud or irregularities to raise doubts about the election results. Another 19 have listed election fraud and irregularities as a key issue, without taking a stance on whether the 2020 results were legitimate.
“We’ve seen across the board, the Democrats have always cheated,” Jonathan Hullihan, a former Navy lawyer running for the seat of retiring Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, said at a recent candidate forum without any evidence. “Eighty-one million votes for Joe Biden? I just don’t believe it.”
Two of the candidates participated in the storming of the Capitol. Alma Arredondo-Lynch, who is challenging freshman Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, bragged that she had an “exciting and unforgettable” time at the protest outside the Capitol, blaming the pro-Trump violence on antifa and Black Lives Matter with no evidence. Sam Montoya, a former staffer at Alex Jones’ Infowars running in the state’s 35th congressional district, was arrested after filming himself and others invading the Capitol and has pleaded not guilty.
Even some Republicans who have acknowledged that President Joe Biden’s win was legitimate raised questions about the election.
“There are a lot of questions and issues regarding the 2020 election that need to be resolved and that are still being looked into, but there is not enough evidence to suggest that the election was stolen or that he is illegitimate,” Greg Thorne, who said he would have certified the election, unlike incumbent opponent Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, told the Chronicle.
The 2020 election has become a key litmus test in Republican primaries as voters continue to be bombarded with false claims of fraud stemming from Donald Trump’s unending propaganda campaign to deny his loss. Trump’s Justice Department and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s “Election Fraud Unit” all found no evidence to support any of the widespread fraud claims.
Two-thirds of Texas Republican voters believe Biden’s win was illegitimate, according to a recent poll from the University of Texas at Austin, compared to just 22% who accept the election results. Nationwide, just 21% of Republicans believe Biden’s win was legitimate, according to a December poll from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
“The belief in widespread voter fraud is becoming the article of faith among Republicans,” Joshua Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project at UT Austin, told the Chronicle.
Blank said candidates’ position on this question is a signal to voters of their fealty to Trump.
“Is there any daylight between you and the former president?” he said. “It’s not necessarily about voting per se, but the extent to which these candidates can present themselves as on the president’s team.”
Though political candidates are notorious for playing fast and loose with the facts, candidates echoing repeatedly debunked lies about the election is a fairly new phenomenon. The Trump administration’s top cybersecurity officials called the 2020 race “the most secure in American history.” Republican Texas Secretary of State Ruth Hughs said the election in the state was “smooth and secure,” which appeared to have led Republican state lawmakers to block her confirmation.
It’s not just Texas: Hundreds of Republicans who deny or cast doubt on the election results are running for Congress nationwide. Perhaps more alarmingly, more than 80 election deniers are running to run, oversee or protect elections in their states and even more are seeking to take over local election jobs.
Many Republican state lawmakers have also gone all-in on Trump’s Big Lie with legislation aimed at restricting ballot access in the wake of record turnout in the 2020 race. Republicans last year enacted 34 new voting laws in 19 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, and have already introduced at least 250 new voting bills this year.
Texas’ sweeping new voting law, which restricts numerous forms of voting, has already become a nightmare for election administrators with primary voting underway. The state’s new voter ID requirements have caused some counties to reject nearly half of mail-in ballot applications and mail ballots.
In Harris County, which includes Houston, election officials have been forced to reject about 40% of applications and ballots, said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo. “We have the receipts,” she tweeted.
In Travis County, which includes Austin, officials have also had to deal with a big increase in rejections.
“Voters are being mistreated,” County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir said last month. “My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like.”
Tennessee’s Board of Medical Examiners unanimously adopted in September a statement that said doctors spreading COVID misinformation — such as suggesting that vaccines contain microchips — could jeopardize their license to practice.
“I’m very glad that we’re taking this step,” Dr. Stephen Loyd, the panel’s vice president, said at the time. “If you’re spreading this willful misinformation, for me it’s going to be really hard to do anything other than put you on probation or take your license for a year. There has to be a message sent for this. It’s not OK.”
The board’s statement was posted on a government website.
But before any physicians could be reprimanded for spreading falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines or treatments, Republican lawmakers threatened to disband the medical board.
The growing tension in Tennessee between conservative lawmakers and the state’s medical board may be the most prominent example in the country. But the Federation of State Medical Boards, which created the language adopted by at least 15 state boards, is tracking legislation introduced by Republicans in at least 14 states that would restrict a medical board’s authority to discipline doctors for their advice on COVID.
Dr. Humayun Chaudhry, the federation’s CEO, called it “an unwelcome trend.” The nonprofit association, based in Euless, Texas, says the statement is merely a COVID-specific restatement of an existing rule: that doctors who engage in behavior that puts patients at risk could face disciplinary action.
Although doctors have leeway to decide which treatments to provide, the medical boards that oversee them have broad authority over licensing. Often, doctors are investigated for violating guidelines on prescribing high-powered drugs. But physicians are sometimes punished for other “unprofessional conduct.” In 2013, Tennessee’s board fined U.S. Rep. Scott DesJarlais for separately having sexual relations with two female patients more than a decade earlier.
Still, stopping doctors from sharing unsound medical advice has proved challenging. Even defining misinformation has been difficult. And during the pandemic, resistance from some state legislatures is complicating the effort.
A relatively small group of physicians peddle COVID misinformation, but many of them associate with America’s Frontline Doctors. Its founder, Dr. Simone Gold, has claimed patients are dying from COVID treatments, not the virus itself. Dr. Sherri Tenpenny said in a legislative hearing in Ohio that the COVID vaccine could magnetize patients. Dr. Stella Immanuel has pushed hydroxychloroquine as a COVID cure in Texas, although clinical trials showed that it had no benefit. None of them agreed to requests for comment.
The Texas Medical Board fined Immanuel $500 for not informing a patient of the risks associated with using hydroxychloroquine as an off-label COVID treatment.
In Tennessee, state lawmakers called a special legislative session in October to address COVID restrictions, and Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed a sweeping package of bills that push back against pandemic rules. One included language directed at the medical board’s recent COVID policy statement, making it more difficult for the panel to investigate complaints about physicians’ advice on COVID vaccines or treatments.
In November, Republican state Rep. John Ragan sent the medical board a letter demanding that the statement be deleted from the state’s website. Ragan leads a legislative panel that had raised the prospect of defunding the state’s health department over its promotion of COVID vaccines to teens.
Among his demands, Ragan listed 20 questions he wanted the medical board to answer in writing, including why the misinformation “policy” was proposed nearly two years into the pandemic, which scholars would determine what constitutes misinformation, and how was the “policy” not an infringement on the doctor-patient relationship.
“If you fail to act promptly, your organization will be required to appear before the Joint Government Operations Committee to explain your inaction,” Ragan wrote in the letter, obtained by KHN and Nashville Public Radio.
In response to a request for comment, Ragan said that “any executive agency, including Board of Medical Examiners, that refuses to follow the law is subject to dissolution.”
He set a deadline of Dec. 7.
In Florida, a Republican-sponsored bill making its way through the state legislature proposes to ban medical boards from revoking or threatening to revoke doctors’ licenses for what they say unless “direct physical harm” of a patient occurred. If the publicized complaint can’t be proved, the board could owe a doctor up to $1.5 million in damages.
Although Florida’s medical board has not adopted the Federation of State Medical Boards’ COVID misinformation statement, the panel has considered misinformation complaints against physicians, including the state’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo.
Chaudhry said he’s surprised just how many COVID-related complaints are being filed across the country. Often, boards do not publicize investigations before a violation of ethics or standards is confirmed. But in response to a survey by the federation in late 2021, two-thirds of state boards reported an increase in misinformation complaints. And the federation said 12 boards had taken action against a licensed physician.
“At the end of the day, if a physician who is licensed engages in activity that causes harm, the state medical boards are the ones that historically have been set up to look into the situation and make a judgment about what happened or didn’t happen,” Chaudhry said. “And if you start to chip away at that, it becomes a slippery slope.”
The Georgia Composite Medical Board adopted a version of the federation’s misinformation guidance in early November and has been receiving 10 to 20 complaints each month, said Dr. Debi Dalton, the chairperson. Two months in, no one had been sanctioned.
Dalton said that even putting out a misinformation policy leaves some “gray” area. Generally, physicians are expected to follow the “consensus,” rather than “the newest information that pops up on social media,” she said.
“We expect physicians to think ethically, professionally, and with the safety of patients in mind,” Dalton said.
A few physician groups are resisting attempts to root out misinformation, including the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, known for its stands against government regulation.
Some medical boards have opted against taking a public stand against misinformation.
The Alabama Board of Medical Examiners discussed signing on to the federation’s statement, according to the minutes from an October meeting. But after debating the potential legal ramifications in a private executive session, the board opted not to act.
In Tennessee, the Board of Medical Examiners met on the day Ragan had set as the deadline and voted to remove the misinformation statement from its website to avoid being called into a legislative hearing. But then, in late January, the board decided to stick with the policy — although it did not republish the statement online immediately — and more specifically defined misinformation, calling it “content that is false, inaccurate or misleading, even if spread unintentionally.”
Board members acknowledged they would likely get more pushback from lawmakers but said they wanted to protect their profession from interference.
“Doctors who are putting forth good evidence-based medicine deserve the protection of this board so they can actually say, ‘Hey, I’m in line with this guideline, and this is a source of truth,’” said Dr. Melanie Blake, the board’s president. “We should be a source of truth.”
The medical board was looking into nearly 30 open complaints related to COVID when its misinformation statement came down from its website. As of early February, no Tennessee physician had faced disciplinary action.
Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit health newsroom whose stories appear in news outlets nationwide, is an editorially independent part of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The corporate news media has spent the last three decades ensorcelled by the indefatigable “Dems in Disarray” trope. Calling it out as a trope is actually so commonplace now — because the practice itself is so commonplace — that it has almost become a trope itself. I feel bad for the journalists stapled to that beat right now, because the real show is down the hall. Mitch McConnell, that banality of evil made flesh, has been revealed to be running a massive behind-the-scenes effort to displace Trump (himself a boorish evil made flesh, and thus irony is made flesh) from the Republican Party. If history holds, the two old curs will soon be at each other’s throats right out there in the campaign-year spotlight.
You have to wonder what it must be like to be McConnell these days. The minority leader for a year now, McConnell’s power and influence seem only to have grown in the intervening time. He had help in this, or course; the months-long policy debate within House Democratic circles devoured the summer and fall. McConnell appeared to have little else to do in that stretch except shore up his caucus, offer the occasional honeyed remark for Trump, and wait to see what emerged from the House. Every 16 hours or so, he’d send out another press release, like a grim bell tolling in the night: “We still say ‘no’ to everything… We still say ‘no’ to everything… We still sa– hey, is this thing on?” Tap, tap, tap.
Of course, McConnell had plenty to do. He made it clear that any legislation seeking to repair the Voting Rights Act was doomed. He played chicken with the debt limit and the government funding deadline. He also made sure Joe Manchin knew that at least one person — Mitch — appreciated the West Virginia senator’s infinite enmity and impatience for President Biden’s domestic agenda.
“Something is broken in the Senate,” Peter Nicholas wrote for The Atlantic at the peak of that long summer. “McConnell’s sustained commitment to stopping Democratic priorities, whatever the cost, has deepened the dysfunction that makes many Republican voters doubt the efficacy of government in the first place. In most democracies, a stubborn minority party cannot stop the majority from debating the nation’s worst problems, much less solving them. McConnell is one reason the United States remains an exception.”
Beneath the surface of seemingly still Republican waters during that time, however, lurked a riptide that threatened to suck McConnell’s political boat far out to sea. From his bespattered perch at Mar-a-Lago, the self-styled once-and-future-king Trump continued to ply his ragged wares, surrounded by a motley constellation of legal hacks, politicians seeking his precious endorsement, misfit media types who see Satan in a vaccine syringe, and former White House staffers who have nowhere else to go because nobody is hiring anyone from that White House. Would you? If so, count the forks.
The drumbeat emanating from this seething coalition grows louder by the day: “Trump won the election… crime of the century… say it… say it and join us… say it or we will bury you.” Over the summer, most Republicans were content to either support Trump’s mayhem campaign and keep their seat safe, or just kept quiet and hoped the eye of Sauron did not fall upon them demanding a reckoning and an operatic oath of fidelity. They are incredibly powerful within the party, that Trumpy bunch. They believe their time is at hand.
So it must have come as a natural shock to see the New York Timesheadline pop on Sunday morning: “Inside McConnell’s Campaign to Take Back the Senate and Thwart Trump.”
If McConnell hoped to keep his anti-Trump activities under wraps, the Times put paid to that with a meaty thud. “As Mr. Trump works to retain his hold on the Republican Party, elevating a slate of friendly candidates in midterm elections, Mr. McConnell and his allies are quietly, desperately maneuvering to try to thwart him,” reads the Times report. “The loose alliance, which was once thought of as the G.O.P. establishment, for months has been engaged in a high-stakes candidate recruitment campaign, full of phone calls, meetings, polling memos and promises of millions of dollars. It’s all aimed at recapturing the Senate majority, but the election also represents what could be Republicans’ last chance to reverse the spread of Trumpism before it fully consumes their party.”
You have to hand it to McConnell; he does a mean Iago. Pulling off a stunt like this is like trying to arrange a massive surprise party where your worst enemy gets fired when they walk through the door. Sure, Mitch clapped back at Trump and the Republican National Committee over their description of the January 6 Capitol attack as “legitimate political discourse,” but he wasn’t straying terribly far with that; he called it a “a violent insurrection” on Monday, which is pretty much what he said the day it happened (though he’s been inconsistent in his condemnation, at other times). All the other days, however, the days where he carried gallons of post-election water for Trump while publicly avoiding any pointed critiques of the former president… that, as it turns out, was Mitch waiting in the tall grass.
At the end of things, it is robustly important to remember that the labors of McConnell in this endeavor are in like kind with those of David Frum, Colin Powell, and the other “Never Trump” Republicans who squeezed out a few good anti-Trump commercials back when there was a market for such tedious things. They are not your friend, any more than McConnell is. These people agree with virtually every policy idea the Trump administration had to offer, because all the Trump administration had to offer was road-bald radials from 1981, GOP policy down the line. They are fine with that, Mitch especially. They don’t like Trump because they think he’s “bad for the brand.”
According to the Times article, McConnell’s efforts to recruit a murderer’s row of Trump-resistant congressional candidates is meeting with limited success. There is daylight, but not quite enough for establishment Republicans to get excited about. What may be exciting is the trend that will not quit: Trump refuses to talk about anything other than the election (and he never stops talking), and implicit with his endorsement is the promise that his chosen candidates will follow suit.
The base will lap it up as usual, but even the rosiest forecasts show that number to be dwindling as voters focus more and more on issues like the pandemic and the economy. The GOP may be bereft of policy ideas, but an increasing number of them know a dead socket when they see one. More to the point, they are all too familiar with the results when the base chooses their favorite sons and daughters to run in tight races. “Privately, [McConnell] has declared he won’t let unelectable ‘goofballs’ win Republican primaries,” reads the Times report.
Them’s fightin’ words, Mitch… but gadzooks, who do you root for in that brawl? The insurgent racists and sideways conspiracists who pepper the Trumpian horde in their quest to be the face of the party? Or the establishment Republicans like McConnell, desperate in their senescence, who have lost control of the party’s base even as they once created it. The prodigal son has come home.
Texas’s abortion rate fell by 60 percent in the month after the state’s abortion ban was enacted, according to data released last week by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.
In August of 2021, providers reported performing about 5,404 induced terminations, or abortions, for Texas residents in the state. After the ban went into effect on the 1st of September, effectively nullifying Roe v. Wade in Texas, providers reported performing only 2,197 abortions that month – about a 60 percent reduction from August’s rate.
September’s rate is also a sharp reduction from the same time the previous year; in September of 2020, providers reported performing 4,511 abortions, or about two times the number of abortions done in September 2021. This is about on par with what researchers found in October of last year.
The agency says that it will be releasing more data from 2021 on a monthly basis, though the numbers may not be uniform because enforcement of the ban has wavered; after it went into effect in September, the policy was struck down by courts and reinstated. However, the policy is likely to stick around indefinitely for now.
Texas’s abortion ban, which was passed by Republican lawmakers last year, is the most restrictive abortion law in effect in the country. The law bans abortion after cardiac activity can be detected, about six weeks into a pregnancy; this time frame has no scientific basis and is so early on in the pregancy that most people don’t even know they’re pregnant. The law doesn’t provide exceptions for cases of rape or incest.
The law is especially cruel because it places the onus of enforcement on private individuals rather than the state, allowing private citizens to sue medical providers that violate the law for $10,000 or more. This essentially dispatches anti-abortion vigilantes to hunt down anyone who has helped an individual get an abortion, including abortion providers or even Uber drivers.
Abortion providers say that the law has cast a widespread chilling effect on medical professionals in the state. One Texas provider told The Lily, for instance, that he used to perform up to 30 abortions a day – but now that the ban is in place, he only performs two or three abortions a day.
Instead, patients have had to travel out of state in order to obtain the procedure. Planned Parenthood centers in surrounding states saw a 1,082 percent increase in patients with Texas zip codes in September of 2021 over the previous two years.
Because providers in the states immediately surrounding Texas, like Oklahoma and Louisiana, have been heavily booked as a result of the ban, Texas residents have had to travel even further to have the procedure done.
In November, the Guttmacher Institute found that Texans have traveled to Illinois, Ohio, Washington, Maryland and other states in order to obtain abortions. A clinic in Tennessee, which is nearly a thousand miles away from Texas, said that it saw double the amount of patients from Texas in September than it did in all of 2020.
Such trips may become far more common if the Supreme Court decides to overturn Roe v. Wade this year, as the Court’s conservative justices seem poised to do. According to the Guttmacher Institute, about 26 states are likely or certain to ban abortion as soon as Roe is no longer in effect. This means that the average American would have to travel 250 miles round trip to access their nearest abortion provider.
A new wave of power grabs by Georgia’s Republican legislators is threatening to wrest control of key local government bodies where Democrats, often people of color, have recently been elected and currently hold governing majorities.
The Republican moves are an effort to consolidate political control after passing sweeping legislation in 2021 that limited popular early voting options, and allowed state officials to oust county election officials and possibly overturn results.
The latest power grabs are occurring under the umbrella of reconfiguring political districts after the 2020 census, and they target county commissions, school boards and prosecutors in the metro-Atlanta region and other areas where recent elections have left Republicans as political minorities.
“They are not waiting for the [next] election,” said Richard Rose, Atlanta NAACP president. “That’s not quick enough for the powers that run Georgia.”
“They used to believe in local control,” said Helen Butler, a civil rights activist who was purged from Morgan County’s Board of Elections by GOP legislation passed in 2021. “The legislature is now coming in and saying, ‘we don’t like the maps that local people put together,’ and they’re drawing their own maps… They want total control.”
Legislation that is now progressing includes Republican-drawn maps for county commissions in several metro-Atlanta counties, where numerous elected Democrats, who are Black, say they are being targeted for replacement by Republicans, who are white. In one of those counties, Gwinnett, home to the state’s largest school district and most diverse demographics, a bill would make its school board elections nonpartisan — masking a candidate’s party — and reschedule the election months before November, when voter turnout is lower.
The school board’s new chair, Tarece Johnson, speaking at a statehouse press conference on January 27, said the Senate-passed legislation was “targeting people of color and attempting to suppress the vote, erase their historical truths and censor diverse perspectives.” Republicans pressing for the change have attacked the board’s leadership, which only recently changed to control by elected Democrats, as incompetent.
That same charge, of managerial incompetence, has been used to justify legislation that passed in 2021 to remove local election officials, such as in Spalding County on Atlanta’s outskirts. It is also the rationale of another bill that would allow a newly created state panel to fire elected prosecutors, which is the latest development in a GOP effort to unseat Deborah Gonzalez, the state’s first Latina district attorney, who won after pledging to ignore low-level drug offenses.
“It was a very progressive platform, and I was very vocal about wanting to run to address systemic racism,” Gonzalez told the Marshall Project, a media outlet covering the justice system.
County-level partisan targeting often escapes coverage by national media. In Georgia, however, a national battleground state where demographic changes have evenly divided its electorate, the Republican takeover attempts follow 2021 legislation that rolled back early in-person and mail-based voting options, and empowered a GOP-run state board to purge election officials in eight counties. Voting rights advocates fear 2021’s legislation could set the stage for overturning election results. The latest power grabs worry but do not surprise advocates.
“We are hearing more and more that the worst abuses, the worst discriminatory redistricting and gerrymandering is playing out at the local level,” said Yurij Rudensky, a redistricting counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “This is becoming an increasing concern in states that were formerly covered by [preclearance in] Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. This is the first redistricting cycle to occur without those protections.”
“In decades past, all of these sorts of changes, whether it is where district lines fall or the size of local governing bodies, county school boards, city councils, etc., would be assessed [by federal officials in Washington] for their tendency to diminish the influence of communities of color,” he said. “And there was certainly a deterrent effect because a legislature like Georgia’s legislature would know that what they were doing would have to pass muster.”
But outside of the Atlanta-based policy and activist circles that are tracking the power grabs, many Georgia voters are not yet aware of the Republicans’ latest moves, said Julius Johnson, who runs a democracy center in rural Hawkinsville — in mid-Georgia — that includes a food bank, meeting space, Black history museum and library, and hosts voter drives.
“Typically, locally, people don’t realize the importance of the local elections,” said Johnson, a Democrat who lost a 2020 bid for the state Senate. “We have to articulate very clearly what’s happening here — ‘Here is the Republican strategy to get these people in at the local levels’ — so that we can get people to step up their game with participation and keep people voting.”
Deepening Structural Racism?
Many Democrats havedescribed the latest GOP moves as the latest structural racism in Georgia politics. The bills to redraw local districts, change who serves on local boards, alter the timing of local elections, and expand ways to unseat locally elected officials are seen by these officials as imposing rules that will steepen the path for people of color to hold majority power. The latest bills come after Republicans in 2021 reversed policies that made early voting easier.
“They’re leveraging their power wherever they happen to have it,” said Ray McClendon, Atlanta NAACP political action chair. “If you look at all of these [voting] changes, it is not to take us back to Jim Crow where you have to count jellybeans in a jar to vote. All they need to do is just take off three, four or five percent of voter turnout and they will accomplish what they want.”
McClendon said that the GOP’s 2021 election reforms were designed to discourage voting and disqualify votes cast early — which is when many working-class Georgians prefer to vote. Unlike the aftermath of the 2020 election when Donald Trump pressured top state officials to “find” enough votes for him to win, McClendon said the GOP’s strategy is for local officials to winnow votes.
“The combination of all of these [rule] changes on the mail-in ballot, no longer being able to have Sunday voting in certain cases because they stacked local election boards, the narrowing of the dates for early voting, the cutting back on the number of voting locations and drop boxes — they don’t sound like they are onerous provisions individually,” McClendon explained. “But when you take them collectively, and you take the fact that every one of these is in a state that is purple, these are steps that are intended to ensure minority rule.”
Data suggests McClendon’s analysis is correct. In November 2021’s municipal elections, the number of rejected absentee ballots increased 45-fold when compared to the percentage that were rejected in November 2020’s presidential election. The GOP’s 2021 law required that all ballot applications and returned ballots be accompanied by a photocopy of a voter’s ID.
Republicans, notably, have rejected the accusations of racism surrounding their voting reforms and county gerrymanders as “ugly” and “baseless.” They have defended their bills as efforts to make local government more representative, especially in parts of Atlanta where whites may now be in the political minority. (GOP sections of the city have repeatedly tried to secede.)
“I do believe that all of the communities in our county matter,” Rep. Bonnie Rich, R-Suwanee, whose map redrawing county commissioner districts in Gwinnett County passed her chamber, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “That is why I drew lines that represent those distinct communities.”
Rep. Houston Gaines, a Republican who represents a portion of Athens, a city about 70 miles east of Atlanta, told the newspaper that the legislature-imposed maps “protect the voice of every Athenian… [thus] ensuring greater opportunities for minority communities.”
Critics like the NAACP’s Rose say that rhetoric — portraying white Republicans as victims of discrimination after losing to people of color — is offensive. It also masks what is unfolding.
“It is a complete overhaul of the system that we know of,” Rose said. “They have to make sure that they control the elections, that they control the counting, that they control how absentee ballots are processed… And, in some counties, like Gwinnett, for example, where the county commission is all Democratic, they now want to change that. They want to change the school board… They feel they must change it if it does not allow them to maintain power.”
Georgia’s 2022 Primaries
There are many signs that Georgia’s upcoming primaries on May 24 will be chaotic for election officials, candidates, campaigns, and groups urging voters to turn out. The ballot will feature each party’s nominees for federal, state, and local office, including local judgeships. In short, the legislature’s election law and voting rule changes (and federal redistricting litigation) have left many issues unresolved, which makes it harder to inform voters about what will affect them.
In August 2021, the Georgia Association of Voter Registrars and Election Officials (GAVREO) passed a resolution in which they “implore[d]” the legislature to postpone 2022’s primary from May to June, because the officials needed time to make “complicated redistricting changes,” such as finalizing maps, allocating resources and related planning before candidates could file to run for office.
GAVREO’s plea was ignored, just as, several months before, a handful of counties with Black election officials (administrators and policymakers) were “blind-sided” when their lobbyists discovered that GOP legislators were drafting bills to fire them (by requiring they live in the county) or to purge election board members (who were Democrats), according to emails obtained by American Oversight, a progressive law group that has used public document requests to expose numerous anti-democratic effort by pro-Trump Republicans.
All of Georgia’s 159 counties are affected by the post-2020 legislation. But the counties that have been additionally targeted in specific legislation have notable populations of color. As a result, organizers like the NAACP’s McClendon or Helen Butler, who is executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, a civil rights group, have been scrambling to track the changes to help voters chart a path through what she says is intentional chaos.
“They’re throwing so much stuff at us that we just have to put things in place,” Butler said. “Our ‘Democracy Squads’ monitor boards of elections to see what they’re planning on doing with regards to the vote… We send people to meetings. We get their minutes. We basically try to get people to report to us in real time so that we know what’s going on.”
“The chaos is real,” McClendon said. “It builds on what they are already doing to marginalize a percentage of voters. They are creating so many whack-a-mole situations that all we are doing as activists is trying to beat down one thing after another and then another thing pops us.”
In the meantime, the NAACP and its allies from the 2020 campaign — which include professional associations in communities of color and data-driven grassroots campaign experts — are looking to revive those networks and stand up “democracy centers” across the state, so that ordinary Georgians have trusted sources for addressing local needs, including voting.
“We have talked about the issues to raise, and one has to be true patriotism,” Rose said. “You cannot support the insurrection of January 6, and if you’re a veteran you cannot support the Confederacy… We’re also going to talk about bread-and-butter issues like Medicaid expansion, because rural hospitals are closing. And education, because the GOP is losing its mind over critical race theory, which has never been taught in public schools.”
But while Rose is looking to reactivate the grassroots networks that led Georgia to elect a Democratic presidential candidate and two Democratic U.S. senators in 2020, the Republican-run state legislature is seeking to reconfigure state and county election districts and boards in Georgia’s blue epicenters — by finding ways to oust popularly elected representatives.
“It’s untethering policymaking from public will and from voter preference in response to changing demographics and the political changes and policy preferences changes that go along with that,” said the Brennan Center’s Rudensky. “It’s very concerning because it really cuts to the heart of what our system is supposed to be about.”
Several campaign committees dedicated to electing Democrats have indicated that they will highlight the GOP’s consistent downplaying of the January 6 Capitol attack as part of their midterm election strategy — putting particular emphasis on language that was used by GOP leaders in the censure of Republican Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming).
In that document, the Republican National Committee (RNC) rebuked Kinzinger and Cheney for working with the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, describing the events of January 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump loyalists violently interrupted the certification of the 2020 presidential election, as “legitimate political discourse.”
Ever since the censure resolution was voted on and approved by members of the RNC, Republicans have been scrambling to distance themselves from it. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), for instance, blasted the censure motion’s language, noting that the attack on the Capitol was “a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent a peaceful transfer of power.”
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) also spoke out against the document, saying that it would disadvantage Republicans in the upcoming elections this fall. “Every moment that is spent re-litigating a lost election or defending those who have been convicted of criminal behavior moves us further away from the goal of victory this fall,” Collins said.
Several Democratic Party campaign committees and Political Action Committees (PACs) recently told Axios that they won’t let voters forget about the RNC’s characterization of the Capitol breach as “legitimate political discourse.”
“We will ensure that they are held accountable for a position completely at odds with the American people,” House Majority PAC executive director Abby Curran said.
“[We will] continue to remind voters throughout the year that the official position of the Republican Party is that attacking the Capitol … and trying to overturn an election are ‘legitimate political discourse,’” an aide to the Democratic National Committee said.
Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-New York), chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, suggested that the topic will be at the forefront of the midterm races.
“The Republican Party is having a hard time deciding whether a violent attack on the Capitol is good or bad. We think they should have to answer for that,” Maloney said.
Meanwhile, Democratic candidates in swing districts have indicated that they will make the language of the censure resolution a central issue in the upcoming midterms.
“I will challenge an opponent to discuss it. Do they think that was ‘legitimate political discourse’?” Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pennsylvania) said to Axios.
But while some Republicans try to distance themselves from the issue, making statements that reject the language of the RNC censure, this may ultimately be to their detriment: a majority of the poll’s Republican respondents (52 percent) opposed the view of American voters overall, saying that the individuals involved in the attack were “protecting democracy.” This means that in trying to appeal to mainstream voters, GOP candidates may alienate their own base of supporters, lessening their chances of electoral wins.
Typically, the party of the newly elected president fares poorly in the first midterm races after the president assumes office — and with Democrats controlling both houses of Congress by only a slim margin, Republicans are hoping that historical trends from the past half-century will remain true in this year’s midterms.
Highlighting the GOP’s role in the events of January 6 will likely work to Democrats’ advantage — as will emphasizing Republican candidates’ ties to former President Donald Trump, whose favorability ratings in most polls are a net-negative in the double digits.
A previous draft of the resolution that formally censured Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), which was composed by the Republican National Committee (RNC), vastly downplayed the attack on the U.S. Capitol building last year, describing the breach of the Capitol by a mob of Trump loyalists as “non-violent.”
Although the final version of the censure document removed that descriptor, the document’s depiction of the Capitol attack still sparked criticism.
Last week, the RNC voted to adopt a resolution condemning Kinzinger and Cheney for their involvement in the House select committee investigating the attack; the resolution accuses the commission of persecuting Trump loyalists and refers to that day’s violence as “legitimate political discourse.” But an early draft of the censure resolution suggests that the RNC wanted to downplay the events of January 6, 2021, even further.
According to The New York Times, which obtained a copy of the early draft, the RNC was preparing to describe the Capitol attack as “ordinary citizens engaged in nonviolent and legal political discourse.”
Republicans’ positions on the Capitol attack have shifted numerous times over the past year. Initially, most GOP lawmakers and party members condemned the Trump loyalists who breached the Capitol – but gradually, leaders like RNC chair Ronna McDaniel and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) backtracked their initial disapproval of the day’s events, perhaps influenced by former President Donald Trump’s repeated defense of his loyalists’ actions.
Still, there appears to be a noticeable schism within the Republican Party, as some Republican lawmakers have denounced the censure resolution’s language as inaccurate and flawed. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) – McDaniel’s uncle – is among those who have voiced their disapproval of the resolution’s wording.
“It could not have been a more inappropriate message,” Romney said, adding that he has “expressed [his] point of view” to McDaniel through text messages.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) has also spoken out against the language used in the censure, breaking away from McCarthy, his counterpart in the House.
“We all were here. We saw what happened,” McConnell said in a recent statement. “It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”
Several Democrats condemned the document’s characterization of the Capitol attack.
“There was no ‘legitimate political discourse’ occurring on Jan 6,” said Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona). “What occurred was a mob, incited by the Big Lie, who attacked our democracy.”
The RNC’s censure of Kinzinger and Cheney was also rebuked by members of the January 6 committee.
Peace protest at the White House – Photo credit: iacenter.org
While the Biden administration is sending more troops and weapons to inflame the Ukraine conflict and Congress is pouring more fuel on the fire, the American people are on a totally different track.
A December 2021 poll found that a plurality of Americans in both political parties prefer to resolve differences over Ukraine through diplomacy. Another December poll found that a plurality of Americans (48 percent) would oppose going to war with Russia should it invade Ukraine, with only 27 percent favoring U.S. military involvement.
The conservative Koch Institute, which commissioned that poll, concluded that “the United States has no vital interests at stake in Ukraine and continuing to take actions that increase the risk of a confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia is therefore not necessary for our security. After more than two decades of endless war abroad, it is not surprising there is wariness among the American people for yet another war that wouldn’t make us safer or more prosperous.”
The most anti-war popular voice on the right is Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has been lashing out against the hawks in both parties, as have other anti-interventionist libertarians.
On the left, the anti-war sentiment was in full force on February 5, when over 75 protests took place from Maine to Alaska. The protesters, including union activists, environmentalists, healthcare workers and students, denounced pouring even more money into the military when we have so many burning needs at home.
You would think Congress would be echoing the public sentiment that a war with Russia is not in our national interest. Instead, taking our nation to war and supporting the gargantuan military budget seem to be the only issues that both parties agree on.
Most Republicans in Congress are criticizing Biden for not being tough enough (or for focusing on Russia instead of China) and most Democrats are afraid to oppose a Democratic president or be smeared as Putin apologists (remember, Democrats spent four years under Trump demonizing Russia).
Both parties have bills calling for draconian sanctions on Russia and expedited “lethal aid” to Ukraine. The Republicans are advocating for $450 million in new military shipments; the Democrats are one-upping them with a price tag of $500 million.
Progressive Caucus leaders Pramila Jayapal and Barbara Lee have called for negotiations and de-escalation. But others in the Caucus–such as Reps. David Cicilline and Andy Levin–are co-sponsors of the dreadful anti-Russia bill, and Speaker Pelosi is fast-tracking the bill to expedite weapons shipments to Ukraine.
But sending more weapons and imposing heavy-handed sanctions can only ratchet up the resurgent U.S. Cold War on Russia, with all its attendant costs to American society: lavish military spending displacing desperately needed social spending; geopolitical divisions undermining international cooperation for a better future; and, not least, increased risks of a nuclear war that could end life on Earth as we know it.
For those looking for real solutions, we have good news.
Negotiations regarding Ukraine are not limited to President Biden and Secretary Blinken’s failed efforts to browbeat the Russians. There is another already existing diplomatic track for peace in Ukraine, a well-established process called the Minsk Protocol, led by France and Germany and supervised by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
The civil war in Eastern Ukraine broke out in early 2014, after the people of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine as the Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics, in response to the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev in February 2014. The post-coup government formed new “National Guard” units to assault the breakaway region, but the separatists fought back and held their territory, with some covert support from Russia. Diplomatic efforts were launched to resolve the conflict.
The original Minsk Protocol was signed by the “Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine” (Russia, Ukraine and the OSCE) in September 2014. It reduced the violence, but failed to end the war. France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine also held a meeting in Normandy in June 2014 and this group became known as the “Normandy Contact Group” or the “Normandy Format.”
All these parties continued to meet and negotiate, together with the leaders of the self-declared Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics in Eastern Ukraine, and they eventually signed the Minsk II agreement on February 12, 2015. The terms were similar to the original Minsk Protocol, but more detailed and with more buy-in from the DPR and LPR.
The Minsk II agreement was unanimously approved by the U.N. Security Council in Resolution 2202 on February 17, 2015. The United States voted in favor of the resolution, and 57 Americans are currently serving as ceasefire monitors with the OSCE in Ukraine.
The key elements of the 2015 Minsk II Agreement were:
– an immediate bilateral ceasefire between Ukrainian government forces and DPR and LPR forces;
– the withdrawal of heavy weapons from a 30-kilometer-wide buffer zone along the line of control between government and separatist forces;
– elections in the secessionist Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics, to be monitored by the OSCE; and,
– constitutional reforms to grant greater autonomy to the separatist-held areas within a reunified but less centralized Ukraine.
The ceasefire and buffer zone have held well enough for seven years to prevent a return to full-scale civil war, but organizing elections in Donbas that both sides will recognize has proved more difficult.
The DPR and LPR postponed elections several times between 2015 and 2018. They held primary elections in 2016 and, finally, a general election in November 2018. But neither Ukraine, the United States nor the European Union recognized the results, claiming the election was not conducted in compliance with the Minsk Protocol.
For its part, Ukraine has not made the agreed-upon constitutional changes to grant greater autonomy to the separatist regions And the separatists have not allowed the central government to retake control of the international border between Donbas and Russia, as specified in the agreement.
The Normandy Contact Group (France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine) for the Minsk Protocol has met periodically since 2014, and is meeting regularly throughout the current crisis, with its next meeting scheduled for February 10 in Berlin The OSCE’s 680 unarmed civilian monitors and 621 support staff in Ukraine have also continued their work throughout this crisis. Their latest report, issued February 1, documented a 65% decrease in ceasefire violations compared to two months ago.
But increased U.S. military and diplomatic support since 2019 has encouraged President Zelensky to pull back from Ukraine’s commitments under the Minsk Protocol, and to reassert unconditional Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea and Donbas. This has raised credible fears of a new escalation of the civil war, and U.S. support for Zelensky’s more aggressive posture has undermined the existing Minsk-Normandy diplomatic process.
Zelensky’s recent statement that “panic” in Western capitals is economically destabilizing Ukraine suggests that he may now be more aware of the pitfalls in the more confrontational path his government adopted, with U.S. encouragement.
The current crisis should be a wake-up call to all involved that the Minsk-Normandy process remains the only viable framework for a peaceful resolution in Ukraine. It deserves full international support, including from U.S. Members of Congress, especially in light of broken promises on NATO expansion, the U.S. role in the 2014 coup, and now the panic over fears of a Russian invasion that Ukrainian officials say are overblown.
On a separate, albeit related, diplomatic track, the United States and Russia must urgently address the breakdown in their bilateral relations. Instead of bravado and one upmanship, they must restore and build on previous disarmament agreements that they have cavalierly abandoned, placing the whole world in existential danger.
Restoring U.S. support for the Minsk Protocol and the Normandy Format would also help to decouple Ukraine’s already thorny and complex internal problems from the larger geopolitical problem of NATO expansion, which must primarily be resolved by the United States, Russia and NATO.
The United States and Russia must not use the people of Ukraine as pawns in a revived Cold War or as chips in their negotiations over NATO expansion. Ukrainians of all ethnicities deserve genuine support to resolve their differences and find a way to live together in one country – or to separate peacefully, as other people have been allowed to do in Ireland, Bangladesh, Slovakia and throughout the former U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia.
In 2008, then-U.S. Ambassador to Moscow (now CIA Director) William Burns warned his government that dangling the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine could lead to civil war and present Russia with a crisis on its border in which it could be forced to intervene.
In a cable published by WikiLeaks, Burns wrote, “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”
Since Burns’s warning in 2008, successive U.S. administrations have plunged headlong into the crisis he predicted. Members of Congress, especially members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, can play a leading role in restoring sanity to U.S. policy on Ukraine by championing a moratorium on Ukraine’s membership in NATO and a reinvigoration of the Minsk Protocol, which the Trump and Biden administrations have arrogantly tried to upstage and upend with weapons shipments, ultimatums and panic.
OSCE monitoring reports on Ukraine are all headed with the critical message: “Facts Matter.” Members of Congress should embrace that simple principle and educate themselves about the Minsk-Normandy diplomacy. This process has maintained relative peace in Ukraine since 2015, and remains the U.N.-endorsed, internationally agreed-upon framework for a lasting resolution.
If the U.S. government wants to play a constructive role in Ukraine, it should genuinely support this already existing framework for a solution to the crisis, and end the heavy-handed U.S. intervention that has only undermined and delayed its implementation. And our elected officials should start listening to their own constituents, who have absolutely no interest in going to war with Russia.
On Monday night, the Ohio Supreme Court threw out Republican-drawn congressional maps after justices ruled GOP maps unconstitutionally gerrymandered for the second time.
The justices ruled that the Ohio Redistricting Commission’s latest attempt to draw constitutional maps that accurately represent the electorate were too skewed toward Republicans. It was a 4 to 3 ruling, with one moderate Republican joining the court’s Democrats in rejecting the redrawn map.
According to the ruling, Republicans in the legislature had proposed nixing one Republican-leaning House district and one Republican-leaning Senate district in central Ohio. But the Democratic-leaning districts that would replace them were only Democratic by “very slim margins,” the justices wrote.
Although prior elections have shown that roughly 54 percent of Ohio voters prefer Republicans while 46 percent prefer Democrats, the new maps skewed even more favor to the GOP, giving them 58 percent of seats. According to the Ohio Constitution, the maps must be representative of the electorate’s preferences.
“[T]he revised plan’s structure guarantees that the 58 percent seat share for Republicans is a floor whereas the 42 percent seat share for Democrats is a ceiling,” the ruling reads. New maps are due back by February 17.
Though the new maps are closer to a representative partisan split than the first ones Republicans submitted, the ruling said that adjustments to the maps were a facade.
The first maps gave Republicans about 62 percent of House seats and nearly 70 percent of Senate seats. Justices wrote that Republicans had not started the new maps from scratch, but rather tweaked the old, unconstitutional maps. GOP lawmakers “started with the same plan that we invalidated and then merely adjusted certain districts just enough so that they could nominally be reclassified as ‘Democratic-leaning,’” the ruling reads.
Voting rights advocates praised the court decision. “Now that the Ohio Redistricting Commission is back to square one, we ask that they finally stop and listen to the voters’ demands for a fair redistricting process,” Common Cause Ohio said in a statement, lamenting the fact that the commissions’ map drawing process is done behind closed doors. “After today’s ruling, these partisan games must come to an end. It’s time for the Ohio Redistricting Commission to do its job.”
The bipartisan Ohio Redistricting Commission is made up of five Republicans and two Democrats and was created in the hopes of stamping out partisanship in map drawing. But the panel has failed to reach a bipartisan consensus on its maps twice so far.
In response to the maps being rejected for a second time, Democrats released their own version of the maps, which they say adheres to the Ohio Constitution’s guidelines for a partisan split.
“Our congressional map proposal keeps communities together, reflects the preferences of Ohio voters, and follows the Constitution. Most importantly, it does not unduly favor or disfavor a political party, in compliance with the Court’s ruling,” House Minority Leader Allison Russo, a Democrat, said in a statement.
“There are multiple pathways to achieve the fair, constitutional map that Ohioans deserve, and our updated map is yet another example demonstrating this legislature can deliver a fair map that complies with the court order and the Ohio Constitution,” Russo continued.
President Joe Biden’s agenda has stalled out in Congress. He’s facing low approval ratings and a potential Republican wave in November’s midterm election. The announcement of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement was seen as a chance to reset the narrative, in Washington-speak, and give party activists some reason for enthusiasm in what could be a grueling and demoralizing year. In reality, nominating a new justice, even one in the mold of the bench’s most liberal member, Sonia Sotomayor, may be little more than placing a fig leaf over a fundamentally anti-democratic institution.
On the campaign trail, Biden pledged to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court, should he get the chance. He’s now poised to fulfill that promise, and if he’s successful it will mark the first time that a Black woman will sit on the bench in the court’s history. The response has been completely predictable, with conservatives using racist tropes to discredit a nominee before she’s even been named, right-wing Democrat Rep. Jim Clyburn pushing an anti-labor candidate, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arguing that considering identity is necessary but not sufficient to evaluate who should sit on the bench.
Perhaps most notable, though, is the lack of obstruction Biden is getting from the two senators who have, until now, thwarted his most progressive agenda items. Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) have served as alternating saboteurs of Biden’s social spending package, and the party’s voting rights and election reform agendas. When it comes to the court pick, however, they’ve fallen in line, at least for now.
Manchin recently said he was “anxious” to confirm Breyer’s replacement, and that he was open to voting for a candidate more liberal than the outgoing justice. Sinema has been characteristically obtuse about her position, saying only in a statement that she was looking forward to “thoughtfully examining the nominee.” Neither Manchin nor Sinema have voted against any of Biden’s lower court nominees, and the feeling within the party is that they’ll ultimately support whoever Biden puts forward.
There are a few theories to account for Manchin and Sinema’s apparent lack of obstructionism. It could be that a Supreme Court nominee is such a momentous occasion that intra-party conflicts can be put to the side. In Sinema’s case, it could be that she fears opposing Biden’s pick could add fuel to the growing campaign to primary her in 2024.
More likely is that each of them understands two things about the Supreme Court. First, and most obviously, that the composition of the current court won’t fundamentally change with Justice Breyer’s retirement. It will overwhelmingly still be a 6-3 conservative court, and is likely to stay that way for years. Second, is that the Supreme Court — like the filibuster in the Senate — is a deeply reactionary institution that has almost always existed to thwart, rather than further, the expansion of democracy in the United States. From pro-slavery decisions like Dred Scott v. Sandford; to the racist “insular cases,” which created second-class status for people in U.S. territories and colonies; to opposition to the New Deal; to the post-1970s era, the court has been reliably on the side of white supremacy and the interests of capital.
Unfortunately, most liberals have a completely backwards view of the court and its history. The famous Warren Court, which began in 1953 with the elevation of Earl Warren to chief justice, looms large in the minds of liberals for its groundbreaking rulings, including ending formal school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, mandating publicly provided criminal representation in Gideon v. Wainwright, and ensuring a right to privacy Griswold v. Connecticut, a crucial pillar in securing abortion rights less than a decade later under Roe v. Wade.
But even with Warren at the head, the Supreme Court was only reliably liberal during a brief period from 1962 to 1969. Otherwise, the court has consistently been dominated by conservatives. Since then, the court has consistently moved to the right, a dynamic that only accelerated under former President Donald Trump. Despite this undeniable trend, liberals continue to imagine the court’s role as a protector of minority rights, rather than a champion of big business and anti-majoritarian rule.
Liberal opinion of the court did decline by the end of the Trump years, now standing at a 46 percent approval rating. Still, arch-conservative Chief Justice John Roberts had a 55 percent approval rating among Democrats in December 2021, only 2 points shy of his approval among Republicans. Democrats gave the Supreme Court as a whole an approval rating of 58 percent as late as September 2020, although that dipped 8 points the following year. Support for the court from liberals seems to be very closely tied to the ideological balance of the court, rather than the court as an institution.
The uncritical hero worship of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg is just the most obvious manifestation of a core belief among liberals. Namely, that the court, for all its faults, is a necessary, natural and often progressive institution in U.S. life. That also helps to explain why there is approximately zero interest from mainstream liberals in fundamentally changing the court, either by adding seats, instituting term limits, ignoring its rulings or abolishing it altogether.
For all the signals that Democrats will probably be able to muster 50 votes for Biden’s choice, the actual confirmation is at least a month away. New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, a Democrat, was hospitalized this week after suffering a stroke. Early reporting says it was mild, and that Lujan should be able to return to work in four to six weeks.
There’s also still time for Republican opposition to eat away at either Manchin or Sinema. For the moment, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his leadership team are reportedly trying to play down early opposition, believing they don’t have the votes to stop whoever Biden picks.
The rest of the party, however, isn’t following McConnell’s cue. Potential Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz called Biden’s commitment to nominating a Black woman “offensive.” Sen. Josh Hawley, another presidential hopeful, said it was an example of Biden’s “hard woke left” ideology, and accused the administration of being “race-obsessed, gender-obsessed in terms of trying to deconstruct genders.” Arguably the chamber’s most open bigot, Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, said he wanted a court pick “who knows a law book from a J. Crew catalog,” and who wouldn’t “try to rewrite the Constitution every other Thursday to try to advance a ‘woke agenda.’” Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker said Biden’s nominee would be a “beneficiary” of “affirmative action.”
Whether Manchin would actually support a court nominee significantly more liberal than him remains to be seen. He’s previously put offers on the table, only to rescind them as negotiations progressed. Where Sinema stands also remains to be seen. If Biden chooses D.C. Circuit Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who recently issued a major ruling in favor of federal unions, either senator could discover a previously unknown objection to them. But if they both go along with Biden’s pick even if she has a history of liberal opinions, that tells us how comfortable conservatives in both parties are with the Supreme Court right now.
This past week has shown the clear and present danger that Trump represents to the survival of United States democracy. As the committee investigating the January 6 attempted putsch has revealed, Trump and his inner circle were willing to do just about anything to maintain their hold on power. Trump himself has, this week, shown just how politically depraved he is: In a statement that he released online, he berated former Vice President Mike Pence for having not “overturned the election.” And at a pep rally in Texas, Trump all but promised that he would pardon those who participated in the January 6 storming of the Capitol.
This is all so far down the lawless, fascist, paramilitary rabbit hole that even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has spent the past six years enabling Trump’s every attack on democracy, mildly pushed back, saying that he was “not in favor” of pardons being issued for the January 6 coup-plotters. Sen. Lindsey Graham, perhaps Trump’s most odious and opportunistic of cheerleaders, also chimed in, saying that the ex-president’s promise was “inappropriate.”
But these are milquetoast criticisms, equivalent to trying to put out a five-alarm fire with teacups full of tepid water. And even those criticisms are a rarity. Over the past year, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has repeatedly huddled with the ex-president at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and talked over strategies to retake the House in 2022, despite the fact McCarthy initially held Trump responsible for the coup attempt of January 6. After Trump’s latest outrageous comments, there was nary a peep of discontent or discomfort from McCarthy.
There are tools to bar Trump, as an instigator of efforts to trigger an insurrection, from ever running for public office again. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, passed in the wake of the Civil War, which specifically bars insurrectionists from office, is tailor-made for the Trump situation; yet the overwhelming majority of Republicans in Congress, including Senators McConnell and Graham, wouldn’t in a million years dream of alienating their base by using this mechanism against Trump.
It is, once again, a stunning example of political cowardice in the face of this concerted and escalating effort to destroy U.S. democratic norms and institutions.
As correspondent John Nichols, my colleague at The Nation, has pointed out, Trump’s promise to pardon those who take up arms on his behalf is redolent of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini’s behavior in the run-up to his seizing absolute power and declaring the Italian Fascist Party to be above, and outside of, the law. It is also reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s behavior — both in the 1920s when he helped instigate a putsch attempt against the Weimar Republic, and in the 1930s when, as chancellor, he used the pretext of the Reichstag Fire to destroy the remnants of democratic governance in Germany and to replace it with explicit dictatorship, the rule of the Führer.
When powerful, charismatic leaders, whose words and gestures sway tens of millions of people, embrace paramilitarism and tell their followers who pick up guns and throw bombs on their behalf that they are misunderstood heroes, they set the stage for a historical catastrophe.
An increasing number of democracy scholars, both in the U.S. and abroad, believe that the U.S. is currently so polarized, and its democratic binding principles so frayed, that there is a real risk of civil unrest, or even conflict, surrounding the 2024 elections. And Trump is actively stoking this risk, apparently having calculated that his personal interests are best served by once again cranking up the rage machine, by once more pandering to and encouraging his own personal storm troopers. In a country as heavily armed as is the U.S., this is a diabolically dangerous calculus.
Trump isn’t just looking in the rearview mirror. He’s not simply chewing the cud about what happened in the dying days of 2020 and the opening weeks of 2021. Instead, he is showing every sign of looking forward. In his endorsements of conspiracist candidates, Trump is seeding the ground for “Stop-the-Steal” true believers to take control of state elections apparatuses in 2022, and for increasingly extreme, and anti-democratic GOP candidates to be elected to Congress and the Senate. In his building up of a vast financial war chest, he is laying the groundwork for a 2024 presidential run, supported, he hopes, by the newly elected Stop-the-Steal gang. And in his embrace of the January 6 plotters, Trump is giving a clear signal that, over the coming years, he is likely to support paramilitary groups, to condone political violence aimed at his opponents, and to cheer on those who have no moral or political limits when it comes to aiding and abetting his efforts to return to power.
Yes, Senator Graham, I’d say all of that is indeed “inappropriate.” But I’d also say it’s fascistic, both in the means it uses and in the ends that it seeks to secure. I’d say it’s treasonous — a personal power grab obscenely wrapped in the fluttering flags of a strongman’s deluded followers. And I’d say it’s blood-thirsty — a gambit that knowingly puts lives at risk by encouraging militias and paramilitary groups to go after those who stand in the way of their vision and their political priorities.
There can’t be a middle ground of compromise with a man like Trump. He is, now, quite explicitly waging war on the country’s constitutional system. It’s long past time to trigger Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and to banish, forever, this vicious gargoyle from public office.
We speak with Rep. Jamie Raskin about his wife Sarah Bloom Raskin’s grilling by a Senate panel Thursday over her qualifications to be President Biden’s nominee for the top bank regulator, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Republicans argue her past comments on climate change show she could use her position to discourage banks from lending to fossil fuel companies. Raskin said if she was confirmed, she would not be able to take such actions. “What they’re attacking is the idea there can be citizens who are fully aware of climate change and take it seriously, who can serve honorably and lawfully in other capacities,” says Rep. Raskin. “It is just an outrageous attack on her qualifications.” We’re also joined by “Love & the Constitution” director Madeleine Carter, whose film premieres Sunday.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: Finally, Congressmember Raskin, could you comment on the hearing yesterday around your wife being confirmed to the Federal Reserve? The Washington Postdescribed, “Sarah Bloom Raskin is championed by Democrats eager to install a bank regulator with a focus on climate change, and criticized by Republicans who don’t believe climate change belongs in conversations about the financial system or economic stability.” It was a serious grilling in the Senate Banking Committee.
REP. JAMIERASKIN: Right. And, well, let’s just say this. I wasn’t there, and I had some hearings of my own, so I only caught parts of it. But Sarah has been unanimously or near unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate in bipartisan fashion twice, as a governor of the Federal Reserve Board and also as deputy secretary of the United States Treasury. So none of this is about her qualifications to serve, obviously, because the Senate itself has approved and confirmed her two times before.
All of this is about things that she has said or written about climate change. She has said, of course, that she will follow the law and act completely within the dual mandate of the Fed. But what they’re attacking is the idea that there can be citizens who are fully aware of climate change, who take it seriously, who can serve honorably and lawfully in other capacities. It’s just an outrageous attack on her qualifications, of course. But she’s tough. But on just the idea that you can even be cognizant of climate change and serve in different governmental functions, it’s an amazing thing.
AMYGOODMAN: Well, Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, husband of Sarah Bloom Raskin, member of the House select committee investigating the January 6th Capitol insurrection, lead impeachment manager in President Trump’s second impeachment trial. Jamie Raskin’s new book is Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. I also want to end by asking Madeleine Carter, the director of the new MSNBC documentary Love & the Constitution, which is premiering Sunday night, what you want people to take away from and why you named the film Love & the Constitution.
MADELEINECARTER: Well, what I want people to take away is that one person can make a difference. I mean, Jamie is making a huge difference in democracy and in saving constitutional democracy, but one person can make a difference just by driving a neighbor to the polls. So, there’s plenty of work to be done by all of us. So, that’s my main message.
And then, in terms of naming it Love & the Constitution, I actually thought of that title at about 2 a.m. one morning in October, because that really describes what the film is about. The film is about Jamie’s love for his son, obviously, but Jamie’s love for the Constitution and for American democracy is really what’s helping him get through this terrible, life-changing loss of Tommy.
AMYGOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us, Madeleine Carter, and congratulations on this film. Again, it will appear on MSNBC 10:00 Eastern time on Sunday night and then move on to Peacock.
This is Democracy Now! Next up, we go to Chicago, where protests erupted Thursday over the early release of the ex-police officer Jason Van Dyke, who murdered 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014, shooting him to death 16 times. Stay with us.
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AMYGOODMAN: “American Skin (41 Shots)” by Bruce Springsteen, the song inspired by the New York police shooting death of Amadou Diallo. On this day in 1999, February 4th, Amadou Diallo was killed in a hail of police bullets after cops mistook his wallet for a gun. Four officers fired 41 times, fatally hitting the 23-year-old Ghanaian immigrant 19 times.
In October 2021, Texas Rep. Matt Krause, Republican chair of the House General Investigation Committee, sent a letter to state education authorities asking them if their school libraries stocked any of the 850 “divisive” books on a list he’d compiled. Concerned about threats to intellectual freedom, a small group of librarians reached out to one another to discuss how best to respond.
“We felt we needed to speak out, support the right to read, and uplift librarians who might be feeling pressured to remove books from their shelves,” Carolyn Foote, a retired Texas librarian and spokesperson for @FReadomfighters told Truthout. They quickly created the #Freadomfighters hashtag and mounted a Twitter storm, urging parents, teachers, students, librarians and concerned Texans to tweet their legislators with pictures of books that help children and teens navigate race, racism, gender, gender identity and sexuality. In one day alone, 13,000 tweets were sent.
The massive outpouring was “unbelievable,” Foote says, but was also proof that many Texas residents were eager to push back against right-wing efforts to control and suppress literature for children and teens.
Many Texans saw Krause’s list as a wake-up call and expressed shock that it included such a wide range of books: John Irving’s Cider House Rules, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, Alex Gino’s George, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Louise A. Spilsbury’s Avoiding Bullies? Skills to Outsmart and Stop Them, and Jazz Jennings and Jessica Herthel’s I Am Jazz.
These books, and approximately 845 others, State Representative Krause wrote in his letter, were concerning to him because they “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” While the missive did not explicitly direct districts to remove the books, it asked school superintendents to report how much they’d spent to purchase the offending texts. Implicit, critics charge, was that these expenditures represented a misuse of tax dollars.
No Left Turn in Education, whose executive director, Elana Fishbein, has worked with several established right-wing legal entities, even petitioned the Department of Justice to investigate the materials used in public schools. In a 15-page letter sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland on January 5, Fishbein wrote that public elementary and secondary schools “have edged into depravity actionable under the law.” The letter asks Garland and the DOJ to “pursue, contain and ultimately eliminate the distribution of pornography in public institutions serving minors.” (No Left Turn did not respond to Truthout’s request for an interview).
Social media and mainstream media echo chambers then repeated the charge that porn is pervasive in classrooms throughout the country, an assertion that sent fans of the right into a frenzy of letter writing to school boards and school superintendents throughout the country — and appearances at school board meetings to demand the removal of “offensive” texts. Media and podcast appearances followed.
Project 21, a group of Black conservatives who operate under the aegis of the National Center for Public Policy Research, was just one of the groups that got on board, releasing a statement on its website stating that, “Children are being taught pornography…. Children are being taught victimhood. Bastardized [United States] history…. Parents have discovered that their children are learning divisive Critical Race Theory (CRT) and being exposed to sexualized content.”
Classics and New Texts Are Being Scrutinized
The upshot is that school boards and administrators are removing books, sometimes permanently and sometimes for short-term review, and are limiting student access to a wide array of texts, among them many award-winning titles that are intended to provoke curiosity and spark additional inquiry.
To wit: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is no longer required reading in Mukilteo, Washington; the school board in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, has removed Susan Kuklin’s Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out from school libraries; and Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe is now under review in Pella, Iowa.
Other frequently challenged children’s and young adult titles include: Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; Leslea Newman’s Heather Has Two Mommies; Anastasia Higginbotham’s Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness; Eve Merriam’s The Inner City Mother Goose; Lois Lowry’s The Giver; Robie Harris’s It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health; Judy Blume’s Blubber and Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret; Tiffany Rose’s M Is for Melanin: A Celebration of the Black Child; Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming; Tiffany Jewell’s This Book is Anti-Racist; Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You and Kendi’s Antiracist Baby; Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give; and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak.
And that’s just the tip of the censorship iceberg.
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, notes that right-wing censorship efforts have ramped up since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Between September 1 and December 1, 2021, the Library Association recorded 330 challenges to particular books, Caldwell-Stone told Truthout. In 2019, there were just 376 challenges for the entire year, she says.
Caldwell-Stone sees this escalation as a way for conservatives to try to control, and limit, what students learn. “The attempt is based on the myth that the U.S. is a monocultural society, but libraries and schools serve diverse populations,” she says. “The right wing is pushing back against efforts to be inclusive.”
These efforts, she continues, are presented as a matter of parental rights, and are part of longstanding conservative efforts to sidestep discussions of sexuality, sexual behavior and gender identity in public school classrooms. Now, she says, the furor over CRT — which has never been part of the K-12 curriculum — has created a backlash that has lawmakers chomping at the bit to prove their right-wing bona fides.
“In Florida, Oklahoma and Tennessee lawmakers have passed bills to ban instruction of ‘divisive’ concepts or ‘divisive’ content,” Caldwell-Stone says. “Statutes that deem certain materials ‘harmful to minors’ are also now being used to accuse schools and libraries of pandering obscenity. We’re currently tracking 13 such bills in states including Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Nebraska and Oklahoma.”
Senate Bill 17 in Indiana, she continues, will, if passed, allow parents to sue schools — pre-K through college level — for disseminating materials that they consider “harmful to minors.” A companion bill, SB 167, will allow parental input into all curricula, ostensibly to weed out CRT or other “divisive” topics. The bill also mandates parental consent before a minor can receive mental health, psychological or social and emotional support from school personnel.
The right calls these bills a move toward transparency. But librarian Foote of @FReadomfighters cautions that progressives need to be mindful not to “present as opposed to openness. It’s important,” she says, “to figure out how to speak about this so that we’re not positioned as favoring opaqueness or secrecy. The focus needs to stay on censorship, the desire of some parents to control what all children can read.”
Students and Parents Form Banned Book Clubs
That idea that a stranger will decide what she can or can’t read angers 14-year-old eighth-grader Joslyn Diffenbaugh. In fact, Diffenbaugh became so incensed that she formed a Banned Books Reading Club for middle and high school students in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, after reading about censorship efforts in Texas and elsewhere. Her mother, Lisa Diffenbaugh, a member of Kutztown Organized for Educational Excellence, told Truthout that while she and her daughter believe that parents can try to restrict what their children read, “They don’t have the right to restrict what other kids can read.”
The Banned Books Reading Club began meeting in a Kutztown bookstore in early January. Its first selection was Animal Farm. Group members are eager to read both long-challenged and newly challenged works, Joslyn says, and will alternate between the two categories. “The response has been amazing,” she says. “Teachers are glad we’ll have an opportunity to read these books.” In addition, donations have poured in, allowing the book shop to provide free copies of the readings to group participants. Even more encouraging, copycat banned book reading groups are popping up throughout the country.
Like Joslyn and Lisa Diffenbaugh, Danielle Hartsfield, an associate professor of education at the University of North Georgia and president of the Children’s Literature and Reading Special Interest Group (CLRSIG), is appalled by right-wing efforts to diminish cultural pluralism, invalidate diverse identities and censor books. Toward that end, CLRSIG, she says, trumpets 25 “Notable Books for a Global Society” annually.
“We honor all forms of human diversity,” Hartsfield told Truthout. “This is why we included Lisa Fipps’s Starfish, about a child who is bullied because of body size. If you don’t see yourself in literature, it’s as if you don’t matter. This is why children need books that are both windows into other cultures and mirrors that reflect them.”
But the current climate, she continues, threatens to stifle which books children and young adults can access. “Trump stirred the pot of open hatred. I was hoping people would step back once he was out of office, but the culture of othering those who are in any way different has become normalized.”
This is where the Rainbow Library created by GLSEN — a national advocacy group focused on LGBTQ issues in K-12 education — comes in. Program Manager Michael Rady notes that while attempts to ban queer-affirming books in public schools are nothing new, ramped up efforts from “right-wing sources seeking to censor queer-affirming and Black and Brown-affirming books” has made GLSEN’s work increasingly important. The Rainbow Library, he explains, provides sets of 10 age-appropriate queer and Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC)-affirming books to schools, most of them written by trans, nonbinary, or authors of color.
The program began in Connecticut in 2019; this year, K-12 schools in 28 states will receive books. Teachers or school administrators need to sign up for the program, Rady says, but once approved, they receive technical assistance to reinforce best practices in supporting LGBTQIA+ kids or kids who have questions about gender, sexual identity or sexuality.
“We communicate about the student right to read in a series of online workshops,” Rady says, and talk about the 1982 Supreme Court decision in Island Trees v. Pico. In that decision, SCOTUS determined that, “Although school boards have a vested interest in promoting respect for social, moral and political community values, their discretionary power is secondary to the transcendent imperative of the First Amendment.”
This affirms the efficacy of stocking books that tackle topics that some consider controversial, Rady says. What’s more, “The Rainbow Library highlights the specific importance of having queer and Black and Brown-affirming books in their libraries.”
Rady makes clear that providing books through GLSEN’s Rainbow Library program can be life-saving for marginalized queer and BIPOC youth, who are looking to understand their feelings and desires. He says that he is pleased with the program’s growth to date and is encouraged by kids like Joslyn Diffenbaugh who are denouncing censorship and committing to reading and distributing banned books.
The Library Association’s Caldwell-Stone agrees but knows that the battle ahead will not be easy. “Progressives need to pay attention,” she says, “and show up at school board and library board meetings. We need to watch what is happening in state legislatures and speak up. Elected officials need to hear from people who want schools and libraries to provide access to diverse viewpoints and diverse concepts. Lawmakers need to hear that you want students to learn about LGBTQIA issues and read books that address race and racism. They need to hear that you expect them to represent everyone in the community.”
In the nearly two years of this pandemic, we have endured not only illness, loss and social isolation, but also the mentally exhausting calculations of how to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe under constantly changing variants, infection rates and vaccine protections.
From early on, we had to learn to avoid falling into what psychologists refer to as “all or nothing” thinking — the logical fallacy that either a given situation is a complete success or total failure. Many of us used this distorted way of thinking to conclude that if we couldn’t be completely isolated from potential infection, then we might as well not even try.
This false dichotomy was obviously a bad method of risk assessment — the equivalent of someone claiming they can drive drunk every day because they did it once. But it was tempting in its simplicity, and some of us were more susceptible to it than others.
We all knew (or were) a friend who said she might as well go to restaurants since she was already facing exposure at the workplace. We all had (or were) the uncle who argued in the Zoom call planning an outdoor reunion that some weakness in the plan meant that we might as well just gather comfortably inside without masks.
Over time, however, most of us learned to think more in terms of probabilities than absolutes, shades of gray rather than black or white — even as we might have different opinions about the levels of risk and reward in various activities.
You might think that this collective learning process would have helped in recent months as we found ourselves confronted with the latest new variables in the ever-evolving COVID calculus: a mostly vaccinated population and a new Omicron variant that is highly contagious, less lethal for most vaccinated people than its predecessor, but still very dangerous for vulnerable populations.
Instead, politicians, CEOs and even public health leaders have led a coordinated campaign of regression back into the simplistic and disastrous variant of “all or nothing”: We can’t completely eradicate COVID, so let’s stop even trying to reduce and slow its spread.
As is often the case, our two political parties have used different emotional and cultural appeals to justify their support for the same disastrous policy of letting COVID rip through the population.
For two years, Republicans have railed against the injustice of pandemic restrictions without acknowledging the realities of the virus that makes them necessary. To return to the family metaphor, they have acted like children who think that rules meant to keep them out of danger are “unfair,” and they jump on any sign of parental inconsistency to claim that none of the rules make sense.
Their “all or nothing” arguments, more understandable in preteens than in senators, are that Anthony Fauci was wrong at first about masks so he must be wrong about everything; vaccines don’t prevent all infections so they don’t prevent any infections; 2020 lockdowns didn’t end COVID so they did nothing.
Democrats, by contrast, see themselves as the only adults in the room, caught between Republicans who deny the seriousness of COVID and leftists who refuse to acknowledge the reality that the virus is here to stay. In reality, much of what the left demanded is for Joe Biden to simply deliver on his own campaign pledges of adequate masking, testing and air ventilation in order to have schools and workplaces be open with a reasonable degree of safety.
While Republicans act like irresponsible children, Democrats strike the grating pose of parents who respond to a reasonable question from their kid about a friend whose parents have more lax rules with inanities like, “Oh and I suppose if Teddy Johnson jumped off the Empire State Building, then you would too!”
That was certainly the energy that White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki gave off last December when she sneered at a reporter who simply wanted to know why the Biden administration wouldn’t make COVID tests freely available like in many other countries.
The problem for Biden and other Democrats is that these measures, along with temporary measures paying workers to stay home during peak virus spikes, entail a sustained policy shift toward investing in schools, public health and employee working conditions — all of which are anathema to the donor classes of both parties who have been pushing for a return to “normal,” by which they mean U.S. capitalism’s minimal social safety net and business oversight.
So Democrats have turned to their own more sophisticated version of “all or nothing” logic: gaslighting the calls for basic public health measures coming from epidemiologists and the left as extreme demands for permanent lockdowns in a fruitless effort to fully eradicate COVID. When teachers (and many parents) asked for temporary remote learning to allow schools to adequately prepare for Omicron, for example, Democratic mayors in Chicago and elsewhere twisted this into a call for endless school closures — and then accused teachers of not caring how students would be impacted by an awful demand that they never made.
The turn that Democrats have made in recent months toward embracing the Republican policy of giving up the fight against COVID is catastrophic today, and ominous for the future. One in five health care workers has left the industry since the start of the pandemic — and the current crush on hospitals will likely worsen that trend, which could prove disastrous if a future variant that’s more lethal than Omicron emerges.
Then there’s our culture’s increasing desensitization to mass death. In January, there were around 2,000 COVID deaths a day, at the same time as our public discourse has been filled with conservatives and liberals alike complaining that we’re overly concerned about COVID.
The glimmer of hope is in the signs that many people have not followed this charge into illogic and cruelty, and have retained the critical facility for avoiding the false binary of surrendering to COVID because we can’t defeat it.
There is the national wave of student walkouts to demand better pandemic safety policies in school buildings, which has provided critical support for educators who have been demonized as somehow selfish for raising the same concerns. And there was the massive blowback that Psaki got after her dismissal of making testing more available, when the Biden administration was forced to implement the very distribution of tests that Psaki had mocked as unrealistic.
But we need much more. Public expectations need to be raised in the same way they were raised around COVID tests after Psaki’s gaffe. We need ventilation in public spaces, universal paid sick leave, releasing people from COVID-infested prisons and paying workers to stay home. We need a COVID justice framework that is identified with the left in the same way as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.
When we raise these demands, socialists are the ones said to be engaging in “all or nothing” extremism. When we support Medicare for All instead of Obamacare, or demand that Immigration and Customs Enforcement be abolished, we are accused of making the perfect the enemy of the good and refusing to see a middle ground.
But there’s nothing extreme about wanting everyone to have the right health care and migration, or that the richest country in the world keep spending money to protect us from a plague. That the ruling class thinks these basic demands mean we want everything only shows how determined they are to give us nothing.
Due to a voter suppression law that was passed by Republicans in Georgia last year, the rate of voters in the state who didn’t vote after having mail-in ballot applications rejected increased 45-fold, according to a new analysis by Mother Jones.
During Georgia’s municipal elections in 2021, mail-in ballot applications were rejected at a rate that was four times higher than during the 2020 election. Officials rejected a record rate of 4 percent of absentee ballot.
Mother Jones analyzed how many voters didn’t go on to cast a ballot in person due to their mail-in applications being denied, a rate that also increased dramatically last year. Of the 1,038 people who had their applications rejected in 2021, only about a quarter ultimately cast a ballot in person. That’s about 2.19 percent of total mail-in voters – a huge increase over the 0.05 percent of voters who didn’t end up voting after an application rejection in 2020.
As Mother Jones’s Ryan Little and Ari Berman wrote, the figure is “an example of how a seemingly minor change to voter access can lead to a big increase in disenfranchisement.”
The voter suppression law that Republicans rushed to pass through the legislature last spring contains a number of restrictions on absentee voting. The new law implemented stricter ID requirements for mail-in ballots, cut the period in which voters can submit their mail-in ballot requests by more than half and reduced the number of drop boxes. The law also made it illegal for election officials to mail unsolicited mail-in ballot requests.
Voter disenfranchisement has directly resulted from these changes, reporting has found. About 1 in 6 mail-in ballots were thrown out because voters had filled out their identification information incorrectly after the new ID requirements.
If the rate of rejections from last year was applied to the 2020 election, over 38,000 people would not have voted in the presidential election. This is over three times the margin of President Joe Biden’s win in Georgia; Biden won the state by only 11,000 votes.
The mail-in ballot restrictions are more likely to affect Democrats. Last year, of the people who voted in the 2020 primaries, 404 Democrats had their applications rejected, while only 145 Republicans received a rejection. Further, 351 Democrats had their mail-in ballots rejected, while only 102 Republicans experienced the same.
It’s unclear why there is a disparity between how Democrats and Republicans are affected by the new changes.
However, election experts warned last year that the Republicans’ voter suppression laws were racist. One reason for the disproportionate effects of the law, then, could be that the restrictions disproportionately affect Black voters; 58 percent of registered voters who don’t have an ID on file with the state are Black, Little and Berman pointed out. According to exit polls, Black voters in the state overwhelmingly chose Biden in the 2020 election. Black voters also participated in mail-in voting at a higher rate than other demographics in the state.
Another reason could be that Democrats generally voted by mail at a higher proportion than Republicans in the 2020 election. In some states, mail-in ballots went overwhelmingly for Biden, even in states that ultimately went for Donald Trump, like North Carolina. However, Republicans ended up having a slim margin over Democrats when it came to mail ballots in Georgia.
Republicans in other states are also cracking down on mail-in votes, leading to similar consequences. In Texas, Republicans’ voter suppression law led to a 700 percent increase of rejected mail-in ballot applications in Houston’s Harris County, which went for Biden in 2020.
Voicing exasperation with months of fruitless backroom talks over the Build Back Better Act, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday demanded floor votes on individual pieces of the stalled legislation in order to force Republicans — and right-wing Democrats — to go on the record opposing policies with widespread public support.
Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, wrote in an op-ed for The Hill that “amazingly, there have been no votes” in the Senate on the Build Back Better package, the House-passed version of which includes an extension of the boosted child tax credit, a plan to lower sky-high prescription drug prices, and significant investments in renewable energy, child care, housing, and other Democratic priorities.
“The result: the Republican Party is able to escape responsibility for their reactionary positions and is now laughing all the way to likely political success in the 2022 elections,” the Vermont senator warned. “Here’s a radical idea for the Senate, ‘the world’s greatest deliberative body.’ Let’s vote. Let’s have every Republican and Democrat take a position on some of the most important issues facing the working families of this country.”
Republicans haven’t exactly been quiet about their opposition to the Build Back Better package as a whole. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has repeatedly derided the bill as a “liberal wish list,” and House Republicans unanimously voted against the $1.75 trillion measure in November.
But Sanders argued that making Republicans cast votes on singular components of the legislation that are supported even by a large percentage of GOP voters — such as a plan allowing Medicare to negotiate medicine prices directly with pharmaceutical companies — would be good politics for the Democratic Party and beneficial for the country.
“Eighty-three percent of the American people support empowering the federal government to negotiate with the pharmaceutical industry to lower prescription drug prices,” Sanders noted Wednesday. “What do the Republicans think? Are they prepared to stand up to the greed of the pharmaceutical industry which charges us the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs?”
“Let’s vote and find out,” the senator wrote.
Sanders made the same demand of other portions of the Build Back Better Act, from Medicare expansion to paid family leave to tax hikes on the rich to climate action — all of which, the senator argued, have strong backing from the U.S. public.
“This is an enormously difficult moment for the struggling working class of our country, and the Senate needs to act,” he wrote. “In our democracy, the American people have a right to know where their senators stand on the most important issues impacting their lives. No more endless ‘negotiations.’ No more hiding behind closed doors. Let’s vote.”
84% want to expand Medicare
83% want Medicare to lower drug prices
76% want to expand home healthcare
73% want paid family leave
71% want to tax the rich
The American people have a right to know which side their Senator is on. It’s time to vote. https://t.co/CYuY7M6Yzt
Sanders’ op-ed was published as Democratic leaders signaled plans to revive the Build Back Better Act in some form — and potentially with a different name — after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) killed an earlier iteration of the bill and demanded that the party start “from scratch,” taking even his own counterproposal off the table.
In a last-ditch push to make progress on a central element of his domestic policy agenda, President Joe Biden has suggested breaking up the Build Back Better package and attempting to pass “big chunks” of it, including green energy provisions. But it’s unclear whether such a strategy would be workable, given the constraints of the budget reconciliation process.
“What the president calls ‘chunks,’ I would hope would be a major bill going forward. It may be more limited, but it is still significant,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters last week. “This is a reconciliation bill. So when people say let’s divide it up… No, they don’t understand the process.”
With the path forward for Democrats’ main legislative priority highly uncertain and as key pandemic relief programs continue to lapse, Sanders and progressive activists have vocally warned in recent days that the party could face disaster in the fast-approaching midterm elections.
“The majority of people are demoralized. Programs were put into place to help people with loss, but when you apply for these programs, you face obstruction.” – Marthella Johnson, Arkansas Community Organization pic.twitter.com/Tiq7NnXhVw
“After six months of ‘negotiating’ behind closed doors with these two conservative Democratic senators, there is widespread understanding that this strategy has failed not only from a policy point of view, but politically as well,” Sanders wrote in an email to supporters Wednesday, referring to Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).
“The base of the Democratic Party is now demoralized and, according to many polls, Republicans stand a strong chance of winning the House and the Senate in the 2022 elections,” the Vermont senator continued. “We need a new direction, a new approach. We need to show the American people that we are prepared to stand up and fight for the working families of this country.”
On Monday, federal judges rejected a redistricted congressional map in Alabama, saying that the Republican-drawn map likely violated the Voting Rights Act, which protects voting rights for non-white groups.
The judges ruled that the Republican-led legislature in the state must redraw new maps that give Black voters two districts with a majority-Black population or “in which Black voters otherwise have an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice,” the panel of three judges wrote.
“Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress,” the ruling reads. “We find that the plaintiffs will suffer an irreparable harm if they must vote in the 2022 congressional elections based on a redistricting plan that violates federal law.”
The ruling was the result of a lawsuit filed by Greater Birmingham Ministries, Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, and plaintiffs represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and others.
The legislature must now draw a new map, which is due in two weeks. If lawmakers fail to pass a new map in that time, the court will appoint a third party expert to draw a new map for them.
The court found that the plaintiffs would be “substantially likely” to successfully demonstrate that the map violates the Voting Rights Act.
“The congressional map our Legislature enacted fails Alabama’s voters of color,” plaintiff Evan Milligan said in a statement. “We deserve to be heard in our electoral process, rather than have our votes diluted using a map that purposefully cracks and packs Black communities.”
The rejected map, which the legislature approved last year, has only one majority-Black district, which represents only about 14 percent of the state’s districts. But Black people make up about 27 percent of the state’s total population, meaning that the state’s remaining majority white districts would get disproportionate representation. Two majority-Black districts of the state’s seven total regions would give the state’s Black population more equal representation.
The state’s Republican attorney general, Steve Marshall, has already said that his office plans to appeal the ruling “in the coming days,” according to a spokesperson.
Chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee Eric H. Holder Jr. told The New York Times that the court’s decision is “a win for Alabama’s Black voters, who have been denied equal representation for far too long.”
“The map’s dilution of the voting power of Alabama’s Black community — through the creation of just one majority-Black district while splitting other Black voters apart — was as evident as it was reprehensible,” Holder said.
This is the second time that Republicans have had their congressional maps thrown out by the courts. Earlier this month, the Ohio Supreme Court struck down the state’s Republican-drawn district map for being unconstitutionally gerrymandered. Voting rights advocates said that the map would have given disproportionate favor to the GOP and violated the Voting Rights Act by marginalizing Black voters.
President Biden and the Democrats were highly critical of President Trump’s foreign policy, so it was reasonable to expect that Biden would quickly remedy its worst impacts. As a senior member of the Obama administration, Biden surely needed no schooling on Obama’s diplomatic agreements with Cuba and Iran, both of which began to resolve long-standing foreign policy problems and provided models for the renewed emphasis on diplomacy that Biden was promising.
Tragically for America and the world, Biden has failed to restore Obama’s progressive initiatives, and has instead doubled down on many of Trump’s most dangerous and destabilizing policies. It is especially ironic and sad that a president who ran so stridently on being different from Trump has been so reluctant to reverse his regressive policies. Now the Democrats’ failure to deliver on their promises with respect to both domestic and foreign policy is undermining their prospects in November’s midterm election.
Here is our assessment of Biden’s handling of ten critical foreign policy issues:
Prolonging the agony of the people of Afghanistan. It is perhaps symptomatic of Biden’s foreign policy problems that the signal achievement of his first year in office was an initiative launched by Trump, to withdraw the United States from its 20-year war in Afghanistan. But Biden’s implementation of this policy was tainted by the same failure to understand Afghanistan that doomed and dogged at least three prior administrations and the U.S.’s hostile military occupation for 20 years, leading to the speedy restoration of the Taliban government and the televised chaos of the U.S. withdrawal.
Now, instead of helping the Afghan people recover from two decades of U.S.-inflicted destruction, Biden has seized $9.4 billion in Afghan foreign currency reserves, while the people of Afghanistan suffer through a desperate humanitarian crisis. It is hard to imagine how even Donald Trump could be more cruel or vindictive.
Provoking a crisis with Russia over Ukraine. Biden’s first year in office is ending with a dangerous escalation of tensions at the Russia/Ukraine border, a situation that threatens to devolve into a military conflict between the world’s two most heavily armed nuclear states–the United States and Russia. The United States bears much responsibility for this crisis by supporting the violent overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine in 2014, backing NATO expansion right up to Russia’s border, and arming and training Ukrainian forces.
Biden’s failure to acknowledge Russia’s legitimate security concerns has led to the present impasse, and Cold Warriors within his administration are threatening Russia instead of proposing concrete measures to de-escalate the situation.
Escalating Cold War tensions and a dangerous arms race with China. President Trump launched a tariff war with China that economically damaged both countries, and reignited a dangerous Cold War and arms race with China and Russia to justify an ever-increasing U.S. military budget.
After a decade of unprecedented U.S. military spending and aggressive military expansion under Bush II and Obama, the U.S. “pivot to Asia” militarily encircled China, forcing it to invest in more robust defense forces and advanced weapons. Trump, in turn, used China’s strengthened defenses as a pretext for further increases in U.S. military spending, launching a new arms race that has raised the existential risk of nuclear war to a new level.
Biden has only exacerbated these dangerous international tensions. Alongside the risk of war, his aggressive policies toward China have led to an ominous rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans, and created obstacles to much-needed cooperation with China to address climate change, the pandemic and other global problems.
Abandoning Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. After President Obama’s sanctions against Iran utterly failed to force it to halt its civilian nuclear program, he finally took a progressive, diplomatic approach, which led to the JCPOA nuclear agreement in 2015. Iran scrupulously met all its obligations under the treaty, but Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in 2018. Trump’s withdrawal was vigorously condemned by Democrats, including candidate Biden, and Senator Sanders promised to rejoin the JCPOA on his first day in office if he became president.
Instead of immediately rejoining an agreement that worked for all parties, the Biden administration thought it could pressure Iran to negotiate a “better deal.” Exasperated Iranians instead elected a more conservative government and Iran moved forward on enhancing its nuclear program.
A year later, and after eight rounds of shuttle diplomacy in Vienna, Biden hasstill not rejoined the agreement. Ending his first year in the White House with the threat of another Middle East war is enough to give Biden an “F” in diplomacy.
Backing Big Pharma over a People’s Vaccine. Biden took office as the first Covid vaccines were being approved and rolled out across the United States and the world. Severe inequities in global vaccine distribution between rich and poor countries were immediately apparent and became known as “vaccine apartheid.”
Instead of manufacturing and distributing vaccines on a non-profit basis to tackle the pandemic as the global public health crisis that it is, the United States and other Western countries chose to maintain the neoliberal regime of patents and corporate monopolies on vaccine manufacture and distribution. The failure to open up the manufacture and distribution of vaccines to poorer countries gave the Covid virus free rein to spread and mutate, leading to new global waves of infection and death from the Delta and Omicron variants
Biden belatedly agreed to support a patent waiver for Covid vaccines under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, but with no real plan for a “People’s Vaccine,” Biden’s concession has made no impact on millions of preventable deaths.
Ensuring catastrophic global warming at COP26 in Glasgow. After Trump stubbornly ignored the climate crisis for four years, environmentalists were encouraged when Biden used his first days in office to rejoin the Paris climate accord and cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline.
But by the time Biden got to Glasgow, he had let the centerpiece of his own climate plan, the Clean Energy Performance Program (CEPP), be stripped out of the Build Back Better bill in Congress at the behest of fossil-fuel industry sock-puppet Joe Manchin, turning the U.S. pledge of a 50% cut from 2005 emissions by 2030 into an empty promise.
Biden’s speech in Glasgow highlighted China and Russia’s failures, neglecting to mention that the United States has higher emissions per capita than either of them. Even as COP26 was taking place, the Biden administration infuriated activists by putting oil and gas leases up for auction for 730,000 acres of the American West and 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico. At the one-year mark, Biden has talked the talk, but when it comes to confronting Big Oil, he is not walking the walk, and the whole world is paying the price.
Political prosecutions of Julian Assange, Daniel Hale and Guantanamo torture victims. Under President Biden, the United States remains a country where the systematic killing of civilians and other war crimes go unpunished, while whistleblowers who muster the courage to expose these horrific crimes to the public are prosecuted and jailed as political prisoners.
In July 2021, former drone pilot Daniel Hale was sentenced to 45 months in prison for exposing the killing of civilians in America’s drone wars. WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange still languishes in Belmarsh Prison in England, after 11 years fighting extradition to the United States for exposing U.S. war crimes.
Twenty years after it set up an illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to imprison 779 mostly innocent people kidnapped around the world, 39 prisoners remain there in illegal, extrajudicial detention. Despite promises to close this sordid chapter of U.S. history, the prison is still functioning and Biden is allowing the Pentagon to actually build a new, closed courtroom at Guantanamo to more easily keep the workings of this gulag hidden from public scrutiny.
Economic siege warfare against the people of Cuba, Venezuela and other countries. Trump unilaterally rolled back Obama’s reforms on Cuba and recognized unelected Juan Guaidó as the “president” of Venezuela, as the United States tightened the screws on its economy with “maximum pressure” sanctions.
Biden has continued Trump’s failed economic siege warfare against countries that resist U.S. imperial dictates, inflicting endless pain on their people without seriously imperiling, let alone bringing down, their governments. Brutal U.S. sanctions and efforts at regime change have universally failed for decades, serving mainly to undermine the United States’s own democratic and human rights credentials.
Juan Guaidó is now the least popular opposition figure in Venezuela, and genuine grassroots movements opposed to U.S. intervention are bringing popular democratic and socialist governments to power across Latin America, in Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Honduras – and maybe Brazil in 2022.
Still supporting Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and its repressive ruler. Under Trump, Democrats and a minority of Republicans in Congress gradually built a bipartisan majority that voted to withdraw from the Saudi-led coalition attacking Yemen and stop sending arms to Saudi Arabia. Trump vetoed their efforts, but the Democratic election victory in 2020 should have led to an end to the war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen.
Instead, Biden only issued an order to stop selling “offensive” weapons to Saudi Arabia, without clearly defining that term, and went on to okay a $650 million weapons sale. The United States still supports the Saudi war, even as the resulting humanitarian crisis kills thousands of Yemeni children. And despite Biden’s pledge to treat the Saudis’ cruel leader, MBS, as a pariah, Biden refused to even sanction MBS for his barbaric murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Still complicit in illegal Israeli occupation, settlements and war crimes. The United States is Israel’s largest arms supplier, and Israel is the world’s largest recipient of U.S. military aid (approximately $4 billion annually), despite its illegal occupation of Palestine, widely condemned war crimes in Gaza and illegal settlement building. U.S. military aid and arms sales to Israel clearly violate the U.S. Leahy Laws and Arms Export Control Act.
Donald Trump was flagrant in his disdain for Palestinian rights, including tranferring the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to a property in Jerusalem that is only partly within Israel’s internationally recognized border, a move that infuriated Palestinians and drew international condemnation.
But nothing has changed under Biden. The U.S. position on Israel and Palestine is as illegitimate and contradictory as ever, and the U.S. Embassy to Israel remains on illegally occupied land. In May, Biden supported the latest Israeli assault on Gaza, which killed 256 Palestinians, half of them civilians, including 66 children.
Conclusion
Each part of this foreign policy fiasco costs human lives and creates regional–even global–instability. In every case, progressive alternative policies are readily available. The only thing lacking is political will and independence from corrupt vested interests.
The United States has squandered unprecedented wealth, global goodwill and a historic position of international leadership to pursue unattainable imperial ambitions, using military force and other forms of violence and coercion in flagrant violation of the UN Charter and international law.
Candidate Biden promised to restore America’s position of global leadership, but has instead doubled down on the policies through which the United States lost that position in the first place, under a succession of Republican and Democratic administrations. Trump was only the latest iteration in America’s race to the bottom.
Biden has wasted a vital year doubling down on Trump’s failed policies. In the coming year, we hope that the public will remind Biden of its deep-seated aversion to war and that he will respond—albeit reluctantly—by adopting more dovish and rational ways.
After over a year of incessant publicity, the Capitol building incident of January 6, 2021, has taken on mythic proportions. While all myths are prone to hyperbole, not all are entirely false as the following accounting relates.
1. January 6 was an attempted coup
According to Noam Chomsky: “That it was an attempted coup is not in question,” likening the incident to Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. However, after storming the Capitol building and taking selfies, the demonstrators simply left after a few hours. Their attempt to influence the electoral process by disruption did not and could not have led to the seizure of state power.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald points out, “after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ [Department of Justice] conducting what is heralded as ‘the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history’ [no rioters] have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government.”
Then on January 13, eleven were charged with “seditious conspiracy,” which according to the New York Times is difficult to prove. This raises the embarrassing question for the government of how could some two thousand people conspire in broad daylight to stage an insurrection and the FBI and other agencies didn’t know about it until after the fact.
Greenwald continues, “the Department of Homeland Security issued at least six separate ‘heightened threat’ warnings last year, not a single one of which materialized. There were no violent protests in Washington, D.C. or in state capitols on Inauguration Day; no violent protests materialized the week after Biden’s inauguration…Each time such a warning was issued, cable outlets and liberal newspapers breathlessly reported them, ensuring fear levels remained high.”
What did happen is that a sitting president unprecedently called for a march on the Capitol to contest an election, signifying a breakdown of bourgeois political norms. Quite unlike Al Gore, who took a hit for elite political stability rather than contest the 2000 presidential election, Trump flagrantly broke the rules of orderly succession.
2. January 6 ranks with Pearl Harbor and the terrorist attacks of 9/11
Vice President Kamala Harris (no relation to this author) solemnly proclaimed: “Certain dates echo throughout history…when our democracy came under assault…December 7th, 1941. September 11th, 2001. And January 6th, 2021.”
According to the US Senate report, seven fatalities are attributed to 1/6: one person was fatally shot by police, one succumbed to an overdose of amphetamine, and two others died of natural causes; all were Trump supporters. In the days that followed, Officer Brian Sicknick “died of natural causes” according to the coroner’s report, contrary to false news that his passing was due to injuries on 1/6. Two other police officers died of suicide.
In contrast, 2,390 perished in Pearl Harbor; 2,977 in 9/11. The former marked the beginning of active US military engagement in World War II, which took an estimated 70–85 million people. The latter sparked the “War on Terror,” claiming an estimated 1.3 to 2 million casualties.
3. Trump and his supporters are ignorant
Some suppose Trump and his supporters get by on crude cunning and animal instinct. An unfortunately pervasive left-liberal trope is that people who see the world differently from them must be “militantly ignorant,” otherwise they too would be Democrats. The self-faltering conceit is that if some half of the voting public, the “basket of deplorables,” were better educated, they would have better politics. Little wonder that Trump can play to the justified resentment to this class chauvinism.
4. Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history and the world has never seen an organization more profoundly committed to destroying planet earth
Noam Chomsky, citing 1/6, made the above claim, which is partially true. The Republican Party is part of the bad cop/good cop dyad, which is the political leadership of the US empire. And that empire is the greatest threat ever to humanity. But focusing all the animus of one component of the ruling duopoly tends to render the duopoly itself – that is, the two-party system of capitalist rule – invisible. Demonizing the bad cop does not eliminate the system, but only renders the presumptive “lesser evil” more cosmetically acceptable.
How different are the Republicans from the Democrats? Perceptions of reality are mediated by perspective. For instance, very small and near objects such as a house fly appear to be moving very fast. Very large and distant objects like the stars appear to be moving not all. The physical reality is the opposite. Likewise, the differences between the Republicans and the Democrats appear great or not much at all depending on one’s class and historical perspective.
From an historical perspective, the affinities between Obama and Reagan are greater than between, say, the neoliberal Obama and New Deal LBJ. For a true-blue Democratic Party partisan, the chasm separating the parties is huge. For the Venezuelan whose cancer medications are blocked by the bipartisan US sanctions, the differences are imperceptible.
After the Democrats lost the presidency in 2016 to as repugnant a figure as Donald Trump, they conjured up the alibi of Russian interference in the election and milked that for four years. Now the Democrats can no longer plausibly claim that Vladimir Putin is pulling strings in the White House. So, the January 6th incident has become the ruse of convenience for retaining the presidency and congressional majorities without offending their donors by doing anything significant for their voter base. As candidate Joe Biden assured his wealthy supporters, “nothing would fundamentally change” if he’s elected.
5. White supremacy is on the rise
Part of the perception of growing white supremacy is a commendable increased awareness and reporting of this national blight and a growing movement in opposition. A KKK bombing in the late 1960s of an Historically Black College in Mississippi where I was a junior faculty did not even get into the news. Earlier this month, seven Historically Black Colleges received bomb threats and that made national headlines. The successes of anti-racist efforts like the Black Lives Matter movement, which mounted the largest mass demonstrations in US history, should be recognized.
It also should be recognized that white supremacydidn’t originate with Trump, nor will it end with his departure, but is deeply embedded in the national DNA. Ask a Native American, whose ancestral lands were expropriated by the European settlers as part of a brutal process of displacement and extermination. Ask an African American, whose forrbearers were brought here as chattel slaves and upon whose labor much of the wealth of the nation was accumulated. Ask a Japanese American about the internment of the West Coast Japanese, which was the project of the arguably most liberal president in US history.
As Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace comments: “Fascism is nothing new for us, a colonized people, people who have been enslaved. It has typically been called fascism only when white people do certain things to other white people.”
Listen carefully to “our” national anthem, which celebrates: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave, from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave, and the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
6. What is happening today is the same as Germany in the 1930s with Trump as the new Hitler
Analogies of Trump to Hitler can be misleading. While material conditions for many Americans are distressing, they are not as dire as Weimar Germany, following its economic collapse. Nor do the Proud Boys and company approximate the hundreds of thousands of trained and armed paramilitaries under Hitler’s direct command. Most important, the mass working class Communist and Socialist parties in Weimar Germany were positioned to contend for state power, while trade unions and third parties challenging bourgeoise rule are in decline in the US today.
Under fascism, the capitalist class voluntarily cedes a degree of economic decision making to a dictatorial state in exchange for guarantees of public order and promises to keep their profits. As long as any serious challenge to their power is absent, the US ruling elites have little incentive to resort to such measures.
The charges that Trump is “power hungry” are likely true, though that does not necessarily distinguish him from other politicians. But the force of even his big ego is insufficient to win over a sufficient faction of the bourgeoisie to support a fascist dictatorship when the theatrics of the two-party system are working so well for their interests and billionaire fortunes are skyrocketing.
But that does not mean that they need not prepare for the contingency of fascist rule, which is where the present danger resides. January 6 is being used to justify further expansion of the security state, which has and will continue to be used against the left.
7. January 6 is symptomatic of a body politic polarized as never before
Polarization is the meta myth that overarches all others. According to a Pew poll, “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines – and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point in the last two decades.” This dysfunctional disintegration takes place in the context of a body politic lurching to the right. One side of the political duopoly blocks progressive change; the other uses the excuse of the blockage for failing to make progressive change.
The palpable polarization of the Republican-Democratic hostilities serves as a distraction from the bedrock elite consensus on matters of state (i.e., which class rules) and economics (i.e., which class benefits).
The smoke of the wrangling over the minutia of Build Back Better obfuscates the fact that a world record “defense” budget, greater than even the Pentagon requested, passed in a heartbeat. The squabble over masking distracts from the failure of the world’s richest nation to provide universal health care in a time of pandemic. The issues that truly affect the future of humanity – militarization and global warming – are obscured in the fog of cultural wars that divide working people. Meanwhile state security and surveillance measures become more pervasive, with the nominally more liberal party of the ruling class championing the FBI, CIA, and NSA.
There are fault lines of class and fault lines of partisan politics. For now, those fault lines do not coincide. The narrow positing of the threat of the right around what happened on January 6 omits the larger issues of militarism, the surveillance state, welfare for the corporations, and austerity for working people. On these fundamental issues and despite sharp contention on other issues, there is a fundamental consensus between the ruling Republican and Democratic leadership.
As the House select committee tasked with investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol prepares to subpoena Donald Trump’s allies to testify on their involvement in the attack, some members are privately hesitant to carry through with the plans because of GOP lawmakers’ threats to retaliate.
As reported by The Guardian, members on the committee have recently become concerned that issuing subpoenas to Trump’s allies, including members of Congress, may be too forceful of a step. With GOP members refusing to comply with the investigation, committee members are hesitant to issue subpoenas, fearing that House Republicans may launch inquiries into Democrats if they retake the chamber.
The committee has requested that Representatives Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Scott Perry (R-Pennsylvania) speak with the investigators, but the Republicans have refused the request. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) has openly balked at the idea of his party complying with the committee’s requests.
The committee wrote to McCarthy on Tuesday asking him to provide more information about his knowledge of the attempted coup. Committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) has said that McCarthy is of particular interest to the committee because of a phone call he had with Trump on the day of the attack; the committee is questioning whether or not that call could illuminate information related to Trump’s state of mind that day.
Other top officials like Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, have attempted to sue the committee in order to potentially stave off subpoena requests. Investigators have found that Trump officials and lawmakers have ties to the attack and its planners, but the extent of their participation is still unknown.
Without the voluntary compliance of the Republican officials concerned, subpoenas may be the only route to unveiling certain insider information on the attack to Congress and the public.
However, as the committee weighs whether or not to subpoena GOP officials, Republican lawmakers have already been plotting to launch investigations and other official legislative proceedings targeting Democrats, regardless of the probe into January 6.
If the GOP retakes Congress, some Republicans are planning to launch impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden; some are threatening to investigate and issue subpoenas over subjects like Biden’s pandemic response, his Afghanistan withdrawal, immigration policies, and even the president’s son, Hunter Biden.
Though legitimate criticisms may be directed toward Biden over many of these subjects – with, perhaps, the exception of Hunter Biden, who has garnered a bizarrely fervent obsession from the right wing – the GOP threats appear to be nothing more than retaliatory moves.
The relative failures on the part of Biden and his cabinet on immigration, COVID response and foreign affairs are similar to those of Trump and his administration; both presidents have failed to quell the pandemic and both have implemented exceedingly cruel immigration policies. It’s unclear what criticisms the GOP could direct toward Biden’s failures that wouldn’t also apply to actions perpetuated and supported by Trump and the Republican Party.
By contrast, the January 6 commission is investigating an attempted coup to invalidate the will of tens of millions of voters that was orchestrated in part by the country’s own Republican president and, potentially, sitting members of Congress. Trump’s impeachment proceedings, meanwhile, investigated offenses by the former president that similarly threatened the fabric of U.S. democracy.
“The denial of this sacred right [to vote] is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition,” Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1957. Now, on January 18, 2021 — one day after we celebrated King’s birthday and one year after a mob of right-wing Trump supporters attacked the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election — the Senate is debating voting rights legislation aimed at stopping voter suppression. But the legislation appears doomed to failure.
The right to vote is “preservative of all rights,” the Supreme Court said in 1886 in the case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins. The Constitution mentions the right to vote in five separate places — the 14th, 15th, 19th, 24th and 26th Amendments, each of which empowers Congress to enact “appropriate legislation” to enforce the protected right. Yet right-wingers — enabled by congressional Republicans and reactionary members of the Supreme Court — are mounting a full-court press to prevent marginalized groups from voting.
During Reconstruction after the Civil War, the 15th Amendment was added to the Constitution. It prohibits the federal government and the states from denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.
As a result of the civil rights movement, Congress passed the landmark Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 to enforce the 15th Amendment. It links racial discrimination with the right to vote.
The VRA forbids voting changes if their purpose or effect is to diminish the ability of citizens to vote on account of race, color or language minority status. “The right to vote was the crown jewel of the civil rights struggle,” said Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Supreme Court Uses States’ Rights Rationale to Usurp Congress’s Power
Although Congress re-authorized the VRA four times with strong bipartisan majorities and each reauthorization was signed by a Republican president, the Roberts Court has now usurped the power of Congress and eviscerated the VRA.
In the 2013 case of Shelby County v. Holder, a 5-4 right-wing majority of the court struck down the provision of the VRA which required that jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination obtain preclearance from the Justice Department or a panel of three federal judges in the District of Columbia before making voting changes. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote on behalf of himself, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy.
The majority took a states’ rights approach (citing “equal sovereignty”) which will allow states to enact racist voting laws. They looked only to the end of discriminatory voting tests and the lack of disparity between whites and non-whites in voter registration and turnout since the enactment of the VRA. The court then concluded that the formula set forth in Section 4 for requiring Section 5 preclearance need no longer be used.
At that time, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer, filed a scathing dissent. “Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA,” Ginsburg wrote.
“Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” Ginsburg noted. Moreover, the dissent explained, “the VRA is grounded in Congress’ recognition of the ‘variety and persistence’ of measures designed to impair minority voting rights.”
The dissent said discrimination is “more subtle” today, citing “second generation barriers” to voting that reduce the impact of minority votes. Ginsburg mentioned racial gerrymandering and at-large voting instead of district-by-district voting in cities with sizable Black populations. She also listed vote dilution (drawing redistricting maps in a way that minimizes the voting strength of the non-white population), curtailment of early voting, moving polling places away from predominantly Black neighborhoods and purging voter rolls of many Black voters.
After Shelby, state after state enacted — and continue to enact — voter suppression laws. They prevent easy access to polling places, provide for early closure of polls in Black and Brown communities, make it harder to receive mail ballots, reduce early voting, restrict voter registration and prevent the accurate counting of votes. States including Georgia and Texas have drawn extreme gerrymandered maps which entrench the power of Republican politicians.
Using baseless and alarmist claims about “voter fraud” (which is virtually non-existent) as a justification, states are passing voter identification laws that make it harder for marginalized communities to vote. GOP-led states insert Republicans into the election process and empower state legislatures to overturn presidential election results even after certification by election officials.
In 2020, the Supreme Court made it more difficult to mount legal challenges to voter suppression measures. The court held 6-3, again along ideological lines, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, that two Arizona voter suppression laws (ballot harvesting and out-of-precinct voting) did not violate Section 2 of the VRA, which forbids any voting procedure that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.”
Shelby Invited Congress to Draft Another Preclearance Formula for “Current Conditions”
“Congress may draft another formula [for preclearance] based on current conditions,” the Shelby majority stated. Two bills are pending in Congress to address the “current conditions” of voter suppression.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would establish new criteria for determining which states and political subdivisions must obtain preclearance before changes to voting practices may take effect. States need preapproval based on the number of voting rights violations they have had in the past 25 years. After 10 years without violations, they no longer require preclearance.
The Freedom to Vote Act cracks down on voter suppression. It would facilitate early voting, allow same-day voting and online voter registration, protect voters from purges, ban partisan gerrymandering, mandate disclosure of major campaign donors, prevent state restrictions on mail-in voting, require the counting of votes that are postmarked on or before Election Day and arrive at polling places within a week, set uniform standards for voter ID, provide that no one has to wait longer than 30 minutes to vote and require voter-verified paper records.
The House has passed a voting rights bill that contains provisions of both the John Lewis Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. On January 18, the Democrats in the Senate started debate on the bill with a simple majority.
Although there are enough votes to pass the bill with a simple majority, Democrats also need 50 votes to change Senate rules to allow cutting off debate and moving to a vote. The filibuster effectively requires 60 votes (including 10 Republicans) to advance legislation. Democrats do not have a majority to change the filibuster rules because Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) oppose overriding the filibuster for voting rights legislation.
Democrats are considering procedural maneuvers to allow the bill to pass with 51 votes without altering the filibuster rule. They would force Republicans to mount a talking filibuster to hold the Senate floor with procedural motions and speeches. It could go on for days or weeks, and Democrats hope that Republicans would tire of it and relent. But this strategy, which hasn’t been used in decades, poses major challenges. It is, in effect, a Hail Mary pass.
“I think the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting. They won’t let the majority senators vote,” King said in 1963.
As the Senate debates these voting rights bills, the American people will see for themselves how racist Republicans, aided and abetted by Manchin and Sinema, are stonewalling legislation that would protect the sacred right of everyone to vote.
Ohio Supreme Court justices struck down Republican-drawn district maps in the state on Wednesday, ruling that they were unconstitutionally gerrymandered. The state’s redistricting panel will now have 10 days to redraft the maps.
The decision was made 4 to 3, with one Republican justice breaking from her party to rule with the three Democrats. In the majority opinion, Justice Melody Stewart wrote that the maps didn’t match statewide voting preferences, which were 54 percent for Republicans and 46 percent for Democrats in the past decade.
“[T]he commission did not attempt to draw a plan that meets the proportionality standard,” Stewart wrote, adding that the commission’s maps unfairly favored one party.
Although the justice didn’t specify which party, the maps were drawn by Republicans. Ohio voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2015 aimed at preventing partisan gerrymandering; the redistricting commission will have to redraw maps to obey that amendment.
The decision was celebrated by voting rights advocates who have argued in lawsuits that the new map is unfairly biased toward the GOP and that the map violates the Voting Rights Act by suppressing Black voters.
“The Ohio Supreme Court took an important step in rejecting the cynical partisanship that was behind the Republicans’ gerrymandered state legislative map,” Marc E. Elias, a voting rights attorney who represented plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits, told The Washington Post. “Our fight for fair maps and voting rights continues in Ohio and around the country.”
The news was also celebrated by Alicia Bannon, who aided plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits and who serves as the Judiciary Program director for the Brennan Center for Justice.
“The General Assembly maps entrenched a GOP supermajority and flouted clear partisan fairness requirements in the Ohio constitution – abuses that especially impacted Ohio’s Black, Muslim and immigrant communities,” she said in a statement. “The commission is now tasked with drawing replacement maps. We will be watching to ensure that all Ohioans get the fair representation they are due.”
Indeed, plaintiffs had accused the redistricting commission of ignoring the fact that Black voters have historically had their voting power diluted by district maps. Voting rights advocates pointed to a September hearing in which a Republican mapmaker told the commission that “legislative leaders” instructed him to deliberately disregard racial data in drawing Ohio House and Senate districts.
The bipartisan redistricting commission, which is made up of five Republicans and two Democrats, was created in order to help quell partisanship in map drawing in the state. But lawmakers were able to sidestep the commission, allowing the Republican-controlled legislature to draw what experts said was an extremely gerrymandered map.
The map gave heavy favor to Republicans, further entrenching previously red districts and ensuring that more competitive districts were still right-leaning. It also took one surefire seat away from Democrats, creating a high possibility of 13 Republican seats and only two Democratic seats in the state, FiveThirtyEight found.
